Two steps back three steps forward – life in the online business community
So I have been pretty busy – between having the admagic site hacked – having my old AOL email go down for the count for no apparent reason on AOL’s part – (Some random thing about sending an MP3 file – (of a song I wrote no less!!!) – and this is an account I have had forever (but which we ALL know is an absolute blessing in disguise to get RID of!)
Because Shari@admagic.com is just so much cooler … – and WHO has an AOL address anyway at this stage in the game? Right?!
Still – it is hard to part with ANY email address and I had that one for a long time. I had to send out thousands of emails telling everyone to use Shari@admagic.com. So the really great thing is – for at least right now – I have hardly any SPAM compared to before and this makes things a lot easier. Especially when you get as many emails as I get in 1 day.
Then the site got hacked.
Oh – did I mention I was on my first real vacation in a long time when it happened.
Most of my traveling is business related – but this was THE vacation – really only a four and a half day weekend (as right now it is not possible to get away longer)- but still – not a work trip really (although anyone who knows me knows that there is always some work going on)
So it happened in a hotel while we were in DisneyWorld – which is by any account – in itself – quite a large undertaking.
But I am proud of my reaction to it. I have to say that I have had so many of these things happen that I actually took it in stride as much as anyone could under the circumstances. I had to take a lot of steps to correct the problems and get back on track, but I did it all without throwing any kind of a fit, breaking anything, yelling, or getting upset in any way. (I was concerned when the website DID NOT COME UP AT ALL in the middle of the night – but fortunately it DID happen in the middle of the night right before the holiday and my tech support guys fixed it right away.)
Then the blog lost a couple of previously posted articles – which I was able to recover through the amazing – and we need a BIG round of applause here – Internet Way back Machine. The Internet Way back Machine – for those of you who are not familiar with it – is a great (and invaluable) site that takes snapshots of most of the sites on the internet and so you can see what a page looked like on a date in the past. I was able to find and resurrect the few lost blog posts. It took a while – but for the most part that is done and I can write this NEW article complaining about having had to rebuild what was a already done. WordPress is a weird bedfellow. Let me just say that.
My new philosophy is that it is all a big TEST and I want an A in it. This is all – little stuff – yes it was my MAIN email and my MAIN website and my BLOG I have been working on for a long time – but in the scheme of things – it is all replaceable and not a human.
As long as my humans are OK I am OK.
That’s it – don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all just small stuff. Just very technical small stuff which requires constant attention and a tremendous amount of willpower to keep calm when the technology – as it inevitably will at one point or another – crashes on you. 
Oh – and never trust just 1 back up. Make 2.
Me at Disney’s Test Track
Tagged as: ad magic, aol email problems, internet wayback machine, online business