When I logged into my blog this morning, I was planning to finish a draft entry that’s been hanging in limbo for several days, and then if my day job was slow enough, maybe throw together a Friday Evening Video for tonight. Instead, I discovered to my horror that all my published posts since April 29 and a number of in-progress drafts had evaporated. A quick text to my webmaster Jack confirmed the worst: he’d been forced to roll Simple Tricks back to an earlier state in order to solve a problem with the server. He said he’d try to recover the missing content, but wasn’t very confident that it could be done. The Internet Archive’s last snapshot was sometime last year, so no help there either.

It’s not a huge catastrophe — as best I can recall, there were only three published posts since April 29, and one of them was just a reprint of a poem, not my work at all — but it still bothers me to lose any of my writing. I do so little of it these days, it all ends up feeling so precious to me. Losing the obituary I wrote for Anthony Bourdain especially smarts. I wrote that one in a welter of emotions, straight from the heart, and I don’t think I could begin to recreate it now with a week’s distance from the event. Not that anyone would care if I did; the news cycle has already churned on and his death may as well have happened a year ago. The people who are interested in that subject have already read all about it and moved on to other things, and there’s no sense in looking back.

That’s the real bummer about mishaps like this: They remind me of just how ephemeral online writing is. If it’s not obliterated outright like these entries, it has a sell-by date that’s almost as absolute. I don’t blog much anymore, for reasons too complex to bother going into here, and when I do get around to it, I’m usually behind the curve already before I even get the entry published. And then you give it a week or two down the road and it’s as irrelevant as the newsprint wrapped around your fish and chips. Just more blathering into the void, and to what end?

Why yes, I am feeling like it’s all for nothing, thank you. I used to at least have my little community here, my Loyal Readers, to give me the sense that I was reaching somebody. And then social media happened and that absorbed all those other communities, and I myself got old and found I couldn’t sit up half the night writing this stuff anymore. Is there anybody out there right now? Anyone receiving? I tell myself I write for my own satisfaction, but that’s bunk, isn’t it? I like to think I’ve got an audience waiting to hear from me. But I don’t really believe it anymore. It’s hard not to feel like this blogging thing is over and done.

Even so, this morning’s little debacle has inspired me to make a couple of changes. I’ve installed a plugin that will make daily backups, saved to the cloud, and I’m exploring offline editing software. I could just type everything in Word, of course, and copy-and-paste it over when I’m ready to publish. But like I said… I’m exploring. I definitely want something that will let me save local copies of everything; no more blogging directly on the site! I lost The Girl with the Grey Eyes during the big hardware failure a few years ago, and now I’ve lost Bourdain, and I’ve had enough of losing my words. I should’ve taken these precautions years ago… but like I said, I’m always behind the curve.