Being the smart man that I am, I thought “Hell, I’ll just roll back a ver­sion to when it worked! It’s prob­a­bly some little bug with Word­press, no big deal.” I totally forgot my FTP infor­ma­tion, so there was 40 min­utes of my life I can’t bet back.

In the end I rolled every­thing back and now the site worked again, but I was still get­ting an error that I couldn’t figure out. I tried re-​installing the latest ver­sion, and I was still get­ting an error which totally con­fused me.

Now I’m get­ting angry. Some­thing had changed between a couple days ago and now. Could I remem­ber? Of course not. If I could remem­ber what I had really done, I wouldn’t of had a prob­lem. As a result I ended up sear­ing a bunch and scram­bling to get my site work­ing as it should again. I tried every com­bi­na­tion I could think of that involved installing and unin­stalling every­thing. In this process I told myself, “make sure you backup that theme you worked so hard on!”

I didn’t of course, but we’ll get to that.

Even­tu­ally I had the bright idea of “Why not just copy my devel­op­ment ver­sion over to of the live ver­sion? I mean it works fine there!” I forgot that when you’re going to do a blind copy, it’s gen­er­ally good prac­tice to back up any and all files you may have changed from one server to the other. This includes the files that make up my new theme. The result? I rolled back 2 days worth of changes to the web­sites theme and the prob­lem was still there.

Now I’m swear­ing up and down the walls. I’m saying things that I should prob­a­bly seek for­give­ness for having said. I’m angry because now not only have i rolled back my theme and lost so much work, but Isome­how still have this messed up error!

Now it’s time for me to bust out my debug­ging skills.

• I removed the entire instal­la­tion includ­ing all theme files, plu­g­ins, and extras.
  Result: Site is dead. Good start.
• I rein­stall Word­press and get it point­ing to the old data­base (which was a fun time in and of itself, as i forgot my data­base server loca­tion)
  Result: site is up, back to the old blue but up.
• I re-​install my theme and apply it
  Result: Site is borked because I need cer­tain things in my theme to work. Old error isn’t appearing
• Copy in my plu­g­ins
  Result: no change
• Acti­vate “Hello Dolly” plugin (I like it, shut up)
  Result: Crazy error shows up. I’m now confused.
• Deac­ti­vate Hello Dolly, and acti­vate Twit­ter.
  Result: Everything’s great. Still confused.
• Acti­vate Hello Dolly again.
  Result: The shit’s fucked up again.

Some­how through­out all of my back­ups and my restores, the Hello Dolly plugin got rather messed up. I cannot and refuse to explain or under­stand why. In the end I lost two days of work, and a day of progress because of a use­less plugin. What have I learned from this?

Back your shit up before you start, and for the love of all that is sacred and pure, think about what you’re doing before you do it.

I even­tu­ally got every­thing run­ning again (as you can see) but believe me when I say I could have done with­out the self-​loathing, swear­ing, and stress.