Mapiles.com | Your Partner Online

It was really horrible! It was like a nightmare for me. Why? Wait for my post tommorow!

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As I promised, I will tell you happened last night as I tried to modify my template.

I was tempted to make some changes on my blog. I decided to make a menu bar just like what we usually see in Wordpress themes. With so much excitement, I played with my html for I knew I could manage it. But you know what? My blog theme looked bad because of some code errors. I tried my best to resolve it quickly unfortunately I failed that resulted to one good option, create another page that says “Mapiles.com is under preventive maintenance. It will be up and running after an hour. Sorry for the inconvenience!”

Yes, I redirected my url Mapiles.com to that new page.

But what are the two main lessons that I learned from this mistake? This is the main reason why I decided to write about this. I don’t want it to happen to my fellow bloggers. It’s horrible. It’s a nightmare.

First Lesson:
Back up your files. If you are modifying your html, make sure you have a full copy of the code. One more thing, if you are using blogger, I suggest you create a wordpress account . Wordpress has a functionality that would enable you to import all your posts and comments from blogger. In this way, worse comes worst, you still have your files.

As a software engineer, what I committed is a mortal sin. I always tell my fellow software developers to back up codes whenever they make changes. If possible, I suggest to use source control software wherein they could roll back to the history or versions of codes (but this is expensive).

But what happened is, I went up against my words. Yes, it happens. Because of too much excitement, sometimes we forget the fundamentals. Sometimes we say, “I can do this even if I break the basic rules”. Actually we can relate this to other daily scenarios. I had this friend who had to travel using his car. The place was around 160 kilometers away. He didn’t not check the condition of his car. He was so excited then. Consequently, at the middle of his travel, his car stopped and didn’t start anymore. Too bad is it not? What if he checked his car?

Second Lesson:
Do not panic in times of trouble. In my case, I did. All I thought then was my blog contained live data. Meaning, if I couldn’t resolve it quickly, then I would have lost some web traffic. The bad thing was, instead of one hour down time, it took me more than two hours to make a resolution (although it was not the best solution).

I realized that I should have relaxed. Because you know what? After deciding to clear out my template and make a work around, it was only then that I found out the perfect solution. It was too late already to correct my codes (is there a machine anyway? – just joking).

I hope all of us learned from my mistake. Again, I don’t want it to happen to you, t’s horrible, it’s a nightmare!

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