When Fear becomes Reality

If this is your first visit, you may want to Subscribe to my RSS Feed, follow me on Twitter, or catch up with me on Facebook. After yesterday’s massive blog crash and loss of all my comments, make sure that if you entered my Photography Workbook Giveaway, that you go re-enter. I’ll be extending the Giveaway for one week to compensate for the loss of comments. So, so sorry you guys!

Yesterday morning started out like any other day. I was really excited because of the launch of my new Design Website and being the Sponsor for yesterday’s Edit Me challenge with Branson.

And then, my biggest fear in blogging became a cold hard reality.

My blog crashed.

And I lost every. single. post. and every. single. comment. that I’ve ever written.

I love every page.

Every category.

Everything.

To say that I was devastated, might be an understatement.

I cried. Real big tears. I almost got sick, and I definitely felt increasingly nauseous as I sat staring at that nasty one line that simply read, “FATAL ERROR.”

I thought long and hard about whether or not to take the plunge and just redo everything.

After about 45 minutes of crying and hysterical mayhem, I took a deep breath and started the long, drawn out process of reinstalling, recoding and reloading everything.

It took all day yesterday, and things still aren’t back to normal. My pages are still empty and some of my links are still broken. All of my posts haven’t been reloaded yet. But, for the most part, things are back to the way that they were.

Thanks to all of you who were patient yesterday with the excessive tweeting (as I reposted everything, I forgot to turn off my auto tweet) and the ridiculous number of Facebook posts that went up.

Now, I just lick my wounds and start over.

I after to admit that I realized that my posts were all still here, I cried for my comments. All of the sweet, heartfelt, kind words that you all have left me. The posts that have driven traffic and brought new readers to my blog…readers who have become friends. The comments that created and sparked debate and interesting conversations.

But, I’ll continue to write. And my posts will continue to receive comments. Although, for now, I look like a newbie blogger with no readers and no community. That will take some time to build back up.

I saw all that, to say this: BACK UP YOUR BLOGS.

Seriously. Go right now and do it. Don’t wait around, don’t put it off, just go do it.

Ahem.

Now that I’ve said all of that, here are my edits for this weeks Shoot & Edit/Good to Wow Challenge. I’m also linking the edits up to You Captures theme “Patriotism.”

Monday I showed you some fun 4th of July shots Straight out of camera. Here are the SOOC shots again:

And here are the edits:

I did a little something different to each of these shots. I can’t remember exactly what I did for each one, but I know that I used Kim Klassen textures on all of these, as well as actions from Paint the Moon, The Pioneer Woman, and the Coffeeshop Blog.

Hope you guys have a great Thursday!

Don’t forget to back up your blog! NOW.