You know the feeling you get at the moment between doing something stupid and realizing how stupid it was? That two seconds of limbo where you don’t know exactly how bad you arsed things up? That juncture where you are certain you have gone beyond the point of no return, but you are uncertain what the consequence is?

That’s a looonnggg two seconds, let me tell you. Trust me.

Last evening, I tried to install new photo sharing software on my website. I had used other galleries and flashy showy things before, but they were either too heavy or too hard to manage. Then I found Zenphoto. It’s PERFECT. It integrated neatly into the site and I liked the design, straight out of the box. I loved it. But, my webhosting service offered an easy one-click install that, while very easy, did not allow me the convenience of uploading and downloading my photos using FTP. In other words, I didn’t have a backdoor. So… I tried to install it manually. I checked around, found others online that had done it, and followed their instructions. To the letter.

That’s when it happened. My website disappeared. When you go to ohmenerves.com you got nothing but a strange looking listing of garbage. I have a test site as well and it was messed up too! Oh my God. Oh… my… GOD! I could go to my administration panels and find my database and all my website files, but the site was down. PANIC!!!!

So I called upon Jody. My good buddy Jody. My hero. My lifesaver. He’d saved my bacon before… maybe he could do it again.

Well, so far, since you are reading this, you can see that he fixed my problem, but not before I got a couple of emails with quotes like:

• ha ha
• I don’t think it’s a problem
• what the hell did you do?
• that doesn’t sound good

When I finally got the note from him saying the site was up, I tested it. Here’s the first thing I saw.

The picture, the font on the website name, and the tagline all reflect exactly how I feel. Man!

Thanks again Jody.