April 30, 2018 by Amy
Oops
I had this brilliant idea to port all the posts from my old Blogger site to here, so that all of my Most Important Writing About Stupid Shit would be in one place, and would be more secure. Blogger is a free platform and once my blog grew into something decently substantial (over 2,500 posts) I always worried that one day it would be disappeared without warning, and that I’d lose everything. Blogger has already been sold at least once (I think Google owns it now), and doesn’t seem as robust as a few of the other platform sites, so I figure it’s inevitable that it’ll wind up languishing with MySpace in an unsupported cyber purgatory. I looked into moving everything when I first launched my new online home, but there were lots of complicated instructions involving exporting and importing and inserting code into the depths of my new website and since I had already taxed my considerable computing skills just getting the thing set up, I passed on the idea.
The Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop kicked my butt into writing gear and I’ve been clearing the cobwebs from my brain and from the site. I remembered that I wanted to get my online homes consolidated and looked into it some more. Turns out that the kind and benevolent WordPress gods have made it pretty darn easy. Fantastic! I found some simple instructions online (there were four steps and no code insertion anywhere) and got started. I hoped I wasn’t about ready to jack up my site, and lose everything I’ve written here, although some of it’s not that great and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I did. Meh.
Turns out the first plugin, aptly named “Blogger,” doesn’t work with the newest version of the site. That took me about 20 minutes to figure out, despite the warning splashed in red that said, “It looks like this plugin doesn’t work with the current version of your site.” Again, my technological prowess was on full display. I poked around on the internets some more and found a different plugin, aptly named “Blogger Importer Extended.” It had decent reviews and didn’t involve exporting and importing an .xml file like the other one…all I had to do was log into both sites at once and push a button. So I pushed the button. I was like Alice in Wonderland, blindly following the directions laid out before me.
The files immediately started transferring and my heart soared. I was astounded at the simplicity, and thrilled that I was finally going to accomplish this thing I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s fast! It’s easy! It’s pain-free! I’m a freaking blogger genius!
And then the next tab in my browser, the one where I was logged into my email account, caught my eye. The tab gives the number of new emails in parentheses. It had been sitting at (45 unread), which is actually pretty good for me considering it normally hovers in the 3-digits. Now, though, it was sitting at (90 unread), and then a couple seconds later it jumped to (110 unread), and then (130 unread). Huh, I thought. That’s weird. Who the hell is spamming the crap out of me? I clicked over to see what idiot was filling up my inbox.
It was me. I was spamming the hell out of myself, because I am subscribed to my own blog (to make sure my posts go out to subscribers), and with each new post the plugin imported, my site was shooting it out in email form. It took .0125 seconds for my brain to realize that if I was receiving every one of these posts as they came in, so were the handful of a handful of poor suckers who had legitimately subscribed to my site. I panicked, and did what all tech-savvy people do when things go wrong.
I clicked everything I could find on the screen that looked clickable, including things that didn’t look remotely clickable, while screaming, “STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.”
M sat next to me on the couch, working on his own laptop which appeared to be functioning normally unlike my out-of-control beast, and was alerted to my dismay by my screams and frantic keyboarding. “Stop just clicking, Aim. Work the problem.” Easy for him to say. His email box wasn’t filling up with nine years of blog posts. He wasn’t spamming his friends. “I can’t stop it,” I snapped. I worried that even if I smashed my laptop with a hammer (a possibility I was seriously considering) the importer would just keep going. It was Out There, in the Cloud, doing its own thing. It was out of my hands…wild Clydesdales galloping down the road towing a beer wagon loaded with shit while the wheels threatened to come off.
The transfer process paused on its own, threatening to resume again in 140 seconds. I opened a new window and poked around all over the site to find my subscribers, because it’s been a long time since I checked it out and I couldn’t remember where they sit. I figured if I could find them, I could unsubscribe them and stop, you know, spamming the living hell out of them. I finally found the list, only to learn there is no unsubscribe button. My personal IT guy, Mr. Googley McGoogleface, told me I was screwed. Turns out that Mr. Googleface is like the countless other IT guys I have known throughout my professional career, who have often told me the same thing about a variety of issues both hardware and software related. The seconds were ticking down, and I made my way back to the installer. It mocked me, with it’s “20 seconds to resume…19 seconds to resume…” I was James Bond in Goldfinger, desperately trying to stop the atomic bomb in Fort Knox having already zapped Oddjob and used gold bars to get the bomb case open, only I was in pajama pants instead of a natty suit.
Since there was no way to stop it, I tried backing out. “Are you sure you want to leave this page?” it asked innocently. It also said something about how leaving the page would stop everything and I don’t remember what exact words were used because I was so relieved that I clicked “YES” to stop everything that could be stopped.
I sat for a minute, heart racing, wondering, “How many did I send out? And what do I do now? And how many friends am I going to lose over this?”
Ding ding. It was the first friend, texting me a smartass comment about me emailing the crap out of her. She made me laugh, which was great because at that point I was pretty close to vomiting all over the laptop. The second friend sent me a private Facebook message, because she, too, is awesome and also didn’t feel the need to broadcast it to everyone that I was clearly an idiot who lost control of her own website. I texted and emailed the rest of my subscriber (ex)friends and apologized profusely and everyone was so gracious and kind, even though I made them take time to delete 150 emails. I have good friends. I do not deserve them, but I have them.
I learned through this little experience that when you have a site that’s publicly available as mine is, you can’t unsubscribe your subscribers, which seems weird. Only they can unsubscribe, the most direct way being to click on an “unsubscribe” link in an email from me. I made it super easy for my subscribers to unsubscribe, because I had sent them each 150 emails with unsubscribe links. I waited 24 hours and everyone unsubscribed, and I turned the importer back on.
I have everything in one place now, and it only took about five years off my life.
Since everything transferred over I have no reason to think that I would ever make a mass update to my site again, so if you want to subscribe or re-subscribe, enter your email address in the box down in the lower right corner and click “Submit.” While you do that, I’m gonna go take care of something.
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