Brief Nightmare

I’ve known from the beginning that if and when I would develop my own site, I would go for nothing less than my own URL or domain. This was only realized early this year. But prior to ralphguzman.org, I have had the chance to develop other personal web projects. My first two sites were on geocities.com. Of course, those who are familiar with geocities would know the notoriously long the URLs are when you open an account with them. Hence, I wanted a domain that would be easy to remember. Hence, I didn’t settle on the free blogs on wordpress or blogger either.

I also wanted the flexibility to really customize my site’s look and content. And you, my regular visitors, would see how often I change the look of this site, as if I were changing wardrobe. In order to do this well, I believe one just needs a little skill and patience, as well as the boldness to do so.

Still, all things considered, I now realize painfully the difficulty of maintaining this site.

This site crashed on Monday night. But let me share now that I have fixed the problems. Thank goodness!

I wanted to upgrade the look of the site and add more features. But I couldn’t, because I had an old version of wordpress installed in my system.

To cut the long story short, I didn’t install the upgrade correctly. And with one wrong click, my whole site was erased — all my reflections, pictures, etc. Good thing I had a backup. And after some hits and misses, and two nights of sleeping at 3 a.m. to fix the site, I now have an upgraded portal for all of you.

With this upgraded site, I am very proud to add a picture gallery, a video gallery, a very aesthetic archive page, and a slideshow carousel on top of the homepage, which shows featured posts.

Earlier this week, I also opened the Ask Ralph section of the site.

The brief nightmare aside, I am just glad — that I am able to continue this site, able to still share my insights and preserve them for posterity — and so glad that my thoughts are backed up.