Killing the Blog

Observant visitors may have noticed an even longer gap than usual since my last blog (April 2015). You may have even assumed that, like so many other bloggers, I’d given up writing for free, now that writing and editing for boats.com and YachtWorld is taking up so much of my time.

(And I must admit, I thought about it.)

The real cause of this lengthy silence, though, has been purely technical. A few months ago, I finally found time to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Without much thought or memory of how damaging a quick upgrade could be, I hit “upload.”

Like Narragansett Bay, WordPress has a lot going on below its surface.

The result? A complete crash of my WordPress database, even after the nice folks at Newtek rolled the site back to before the upgrade. And since I hadn’t backed up in quite a while (since that, like blogging, is time-consuming, but also creatively much less satisfying), the quick upgrade turned into a six week ordeal… until I finally bit the bullet and started again from scratch.

You may think that now I’m going to rant about Wordpress, or my service provider, but the only thing I can really blame for all this is myself. It’s actually a little ironic that someone who works in WordPress daily (on the front end, mind you) could be so completely stupid about the back end. All I know is that the slightest glitch can set all those zeroes and ones scurrying for their bunkers, rather than doing their job: organizing my data into a readable, clickable format. And that will be a good reminder to back up and update on a regular basis going forward.

After a complete site overhaul, Where Books Meet Boats is back up and running again—on a very different template, with all three previous online presences (carolnewmancronin.com, livewirepress.com, and the original Where Books Meet Boats) combined into one fresh site. It’s something I’d been planning to do for awhile, but I would’ve preferred to move everything automatically—rather than uploading each story once again by hand.

The biggest loss was all your comments. There wasn’t a huge volume of discussion, but there were a few devoted readers (and you know who you are) who took the time to share their thoughts, enriching what I was trying to say. Unfortunately those are gone forever.

Several photos have also been lost, but I had copies of most on my hard drive and I’ve re-uploaded those as well. Again, it was hard to justify this effort on any level, except the desire to collect it all in one place again.

Fortunately all of the text survived, since that’s easy to back up. And that’s where the real value lies, at least to me: the stories and anecdotes I’ve collected over the past six years, which cumulatively remind me of the long strange trip that’s led up to today.

And that’s why I’m going to continue blogging here. I write to share experience, but I also write to understand it. And that’s too big a luxury to give up.

I’ll continue to upload older posts as time permits. In the meantime, enjoy what’s already here, and know for sure that… I’m baaaack!