The Lost Content Dilemma

When you produce great content for a website, ideally, you would like the largest number of people possible to consume it. If you promote it on services like Facebook or Twitter upon release and it doesn’t find its way to the audience (for one reason or another) that would have appreciated it, there is a good chance it will be sitting in your archives, unread, for a long time.

I was thinking through this problem as I surfed the archives of a really great designer. Some of his older content was fantastic, but I had to do some serious searching to find it. Not a great thing.

Our best, most effective internet media should be front and center when someone visits our website. That doesn’t negate the need for regular, new articles, which are also very important. The thing we don’t want is the really great stuff our readers “would” care about, if only they could find it.

I’m still thinking through all the potential ways of making this happen without cluttering up a page with more links. If you have any brilliant ideas or examples you would like to pass along, let me know. I think this is of particular interest to those of us who are ministering full-time and blogging rather casually or – when we have a moment. It is crucial that the articles and other items on which we have spent our valuable ministry time are utilized, enjoyed and applied.

Still…Restoring After a Major Blunder

I wrote this unfortunate post last evening on my personal lifestream. I am still working to get one full site restored, dozens of images updated and multiple database alterations re-done. One thing I forgot to mention is that I was using an unfamiliar tool to navigate site files. In addition, I had been working most of the day with no breaks and was just eager to wrap things up. These ingredients make up a recipe for disaster. Another lesson learned, I suppose.

Let me start by saying: always backup your website files and databases. Always. If I had not taken my own advice, you would not be reading this now.

This evening I was attempting to delete a test installation of Textpattern from my server when I somehow got overzealous, lazy or both and apparently deleted my entire public_html directory. That means all of my site files on four websites (including this one) were completely and totally deleted.

I typically run a full backup once or twice every month and had one on my calendar for this coming Monday. I wound up using my latest copy from November 11th. So…it could have been worse.

Suffice it to say I am going to be working overtime to restore data added over the last 39 days to all four sites. That being said, I am thankful for the backups and very happy I do not have to start from scratch. These sites represent (literally) years of diligent labor.

Let this be a lesson to us all – backup, backup, backup!

If you observe some irregularities on this site or one of our others, I hope you will forgive the inconvenience. I will likely be working on getting things “back to normal” for a couple of weeks. If there is a major problem, please let me know.

Still Working on a Full Launch

It’s plain to see the site isn’t fully populated and functioning as yet. We’ve been too busy working on other sites to even think about putting the finishing touches on here. I suppose it’s just as well, as we are not quite ready to begin Abounding Media client projects anyway.

We’re on WordPress theme re-work number three now, as the other options just weren’t suiting our needs adequately. We were searching for just that right look to make people feel at home and at ease with their visit. We think these colors, and the more common layout probably accomplish that better than the last iteration. Let us know what you think about that, by the way.

Thanks to CodeScheme for the original code on the theme, which is (and will be) altered on an ongoing basis. Their link remains in the lower left corner, which is good protocol for anyone working with WordPress or other Open Source projects. If it were us, I know we would appreciate the recognition, meager as it may be.

We appreciate their help especially because we are not in the business of building things from the-ground-up unless it’s called for in the given situation. It was not in this case, or many others we hope to help – yes, when we get launched.

Thanks again for the support if you’ve been one of the many expressing eager interest in the future of this project. Hopefully things will all be taking off very soon!