Recovering My Vanished WordPress Blog: A Cautionary Tale
Sometimes the best stories are the ones you don’t want to live through. Recently An Itinerant Scribe decided to go on an unexpected adventure—straight into the void.
It started when I tried changing my WordPress theme. I thought it would be simple. I wanted to try a new look something clean and easy. Then I could continue on with my posts. Instead, nothing looked right. Somewhere during the switching, something glitched—either I pressed the wrong thing or the site got nudged (or shoved) into chaos.
Then the truly alarming part happened. All my pictures and all my prior posts vanished. Just gone. That’s not the sort of surprise anyone wants with their morning tea. In frustration, I deactivated the site myself around November 17th.
I reached out to WordPress for help. The chatbot tried its best, but it couldn’t untangle the mess, so it called in one of their Happiness Engineers. He took a deeper look and said he’d email me at the address connected to my account. Fair enough.
Except… when I went to check that email, it wasn’t there anymore. It had simply disappeared from my list of addresses. That was when I realized something was very wrong behind the scenes.
Today, while poking around in my settings, I found a link to “Manage Domains.” Out of curiosity—because curiosity is practically my job—I clicked it. There they were:
- My broken site, An Itinerant Scribe, and
- The annoyingly similar one that had shown up at some point, The Itinerant Scribe Blog.
(Yes, the similarity still makes me squint at the screen.)
Since both were sitting there, I switched back to the site I’ve used for almost ten years. My digital home. My familiar place. I also attempted to delete the interloper, though I’m not entirely sure whether that request actually went through. Time will tell.
For now, I’m using the last theme I tried. It will take a bit before I figured out how to make it work. I’m not touching the theme change again for a long time. I want to finish organizing and practicing for my coming Qigong class. After that, I may tweak a header image or background color—but no big changes. I’ve earned a quiet stretch of normalcy.
If you’re reading this, thank you for sticking around through the bumps. The blog may have wobbled, but I’m still here—and the stories will continue.
