Starting From Scratch

Posted by on Dec 11, 2009 in Marketing | 5 Comments

Today is the first day of the rest of this blog. I deleted three-plus years of old content and am starting brand new. While I’m still tinkering with the theme and strategy, it feels good to start over. Welcome to the new home of toddand.com. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: My apologies to all those with inbound links to the old toddand.com content. I attempted to salvage all of it in order to maintain active links but apparently my backups weren’t being executed as intended. And my hosting company only saves three days of back-up, so it’s already too late for a complete restore. Lesson learned. I’ll try to make it up with higher quality content in the next three years. By the way, in my efforts to save old content, I went through a reinstall of WordPress on my server and lost the four or five comments left on the original version of this post. Long week.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’m officially calling this the Great Back-up Crash of 2009 and have become the posterchild for understanding the importance of double-checking your database back-ups. Still planning for 2010. In the meantime, I’ve updated my “about” page to include my short blogging tale.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Thanks to a commenter, Vikrant, and Shannon Whitley (@swhitley), I was able to retrieve 700+ blog posts. The solution was importing the archived Atom2 RSS feed from Google Reader. Unfortunately, the restoration didn’t include images, so the blog may look a bit different. I’ll be working on that over the next several weeks.

5 Comments

  1. John Wall
    December 17, 2009

    Man, I thought I was going to be a hero grabbing some of your old stuff off of Archive.org but your robots file was blocking them :-(

  2. toddand
    December 17, 2009

    Thanks for trying, John. Darn those robots files! Maybe I should put out a reward for anyone who can help destroy those robots and save my old content. This can become a mini Terminator movie!

  3. Vikrant
    March 17, 2010

    Hi Todd, I am new reader was reading blog by leo bottary, and read about you on his blog .. wanted to see whats in your blog, but didn’t see anything here, as you have mentioned all gone :) . So i subscribed your blog in Google reader and i see that all your past blog are present in Google Reader.

    Just wanted to let you know.

  4. toddand
    March 18, 2010

    Vikrant, I can’t thank you enough for your discovery! I was able to work with Shannon Whitley (@swhitley) to retrieve them from the RSS feed and restore my blog with all 700+ posts. Now, reformatting. Thanks again!

  5. Vikrant
    March 19, 2010

    Great,

    I am glad that i was helpful.

    I am sure that many reader would find this a good news. Happy blogging.

    Cheers.

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