Category: 
Hmmmmmmm….
Through a series of mis-steps this evening, I managed to quite effectively destroy my fledgling photoblog, afewgoodlenses. It wasn’t as hard as you might think, and I did it while trying to solve a "problem" that really didn’t need solving, after reading this article:
Giving WordPress its Own Directory While Leaving Your Blog in the Root Directory
There’s certainly nothing wrong with this article, or with the instructions. The change is appropriate to a situation where you’ve installed WordPress in a subfolder (such as "blog") but don’t want users to have to key in a URL that includes "blog" to get to your site. And following the instructions worked, but I didn’t like the fact that after I got it working, keying in the following URL…
http://www.afewgoodlenses.com/blog/
… exposed the directory structure for my site. So, I attempted to reverse the procedure, got it wonky somehow, and afewgoodlenses became inaccessible. I tried for an hour or so to twitch things around and get it functioning again, but finally gave up. Someone with more WordPress experience than I have would probably have been able to figure it out, but I couldn’t and decided to just reinstall WordPress and start over.
It occurred to me after I cleared my WordPress database that I probably could have backed it up and restored the contents to the freshly installed tables, but having not done that before probably would have gotten me in even deeper.
I had previously been using an HTML redirect to send users from www.afewgoodlenses.com to www.afewgoodlenses.com/blog … and have reverted to that approach now that the site is back up and running.
On the bright side, the theme modifications I made so far remained intact and the photos I had posted were still on my host, so it’s just a matter of setting up categories again and re-posting them — which I’ll do over the next couple of evenings. In the meantime, if you linked to any of the posts on afewgoodlenses, the link is now broken and will likely have a different URL when I repost the articles. My apologies for the inconvenience, but you may want to remove those links.
The experience does raise a couple of questions in my mind about backing up a WordPress installation, something I’ve never even looked into. Please post suggestions in the comment section if you have any experience with that; I’d be especially interested in hearing from any one who has actually restored a WordPress backup successfully.
Thanks for reading!
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