Posted January 24th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
Yesterday morning I got a call from a guy named Alon at GoDaddy. He told me that his job was to search the web and to find people talking about GoDaddy…and if they had issues, to help them find a resolution.
The guy at technical support for GoDaddy that originally “helped” me and instructed me to delete my database did not leave good notes, so I had to explain most of the story to him.
He was really helpful and had some of their tech guys send me a backup of my database (that included my last 2 years of blog content) for free…even though their tech support had instructed me that it would cost $75.
Then my boyfriend sat up all night figuring out how to merge the old content with the new content. And he was successful!
All of my content is back!
Posted January 21st, 2009 by Mike Lawson
Changes are coming.
When GoDaddy raped me and stole my money a few weeks ago (CAUTION: NEVER USE GODADDY), and when all of my content was lost, I received this strange gift: a blank slate.
In the past I’ve lost focus of what I wanted to do with this website, and that is to simply tell stories. I may occasionally post a kid using his middle finger or a random Photoshop project, but I’m going back to why I started WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com.
This is a storytelling blog.
I’m still upset that I lost all of my content. Especially those 11 posts that were bringing in hundreds of Stumbleupon users and Google searchers each day. Since the screw-up that is entirely GoDaddy’s fault, I have had trouble getting back into the groove. How do you start writing the third act when you know you just lost your first two in a technical hiccup?
But I’m moving past that.
I have created a backup system of my database that is emailed to me every night in case GoDaddy screws something up again. And I’m doing a little editing of the design here too.
Posted January 14th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
I got the title of this blog from a Joan Didion short story called “On Keeping a Notebook.” [pdf version available here]
In the short story Didion writes about how she sometimes has trouble remembering what really happened and what could have happened. And I sometimes struggle with this same distinction. Didion wrote:
I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t
that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.
So this blog will serve as a place for me to tell my stories (sometimes peppered with a few embellishments). This blog serves the same purpose as Didion’s notebooks.
Tags: blogging, didion
Posted January 14th, 2009 by Mike Lawson
GoDaddy.com sucks. Seriously sucks.
I’ve been a customer there for about four years, and I’ve hosted many sites with them…including this one. Last weekend when people clicked onto this site they were redirected to a wordpress install page.
WTF?
So after talking to GoDaddy tech support (which took a few days to get a hold of them, and I sat on hold for over 45 minutes), I was told to basically go deal with the issues on my own.
Very unhelpful.
If anyone is looking for a company to purchase web hosting from, I wouldn’t pick GoDaddy. I’ve never had problems in the past, but now my entire blog is wipped out. EVERYTHING. Gone.
I’m going to take a few days off, and I’ll be blogging again next week.
Tags: blogging
