A friend in the WordPress community saved my blog today, so this blog post is dedicated to her. 🙂
Let’s back up for a moment. I attended WordCamp this past weekend. In fact, I was one of the organizers together with the awesome team of @markgazel, @dejliglama, @risager, and @anetq. WordCamp Denmark 2014 was also awesome. That is not an exaggeration. Our hosts, One.com, provided excellent facilities and great food. And they are blessed with an employee who thinks baking gigantic cakes for 150 people is fun!
What happened at WordCamp does not stay at WordCamp. Those stories will get shared. The WordCamp site has links to the slides and the photos, etc. I left in a fantastic mood from the last three conversation there with three happy people. They were all so excited by the weekend that they said they wanted to get more involved in the community around WordCamp. The excitement was tangible. I left with lots of warm fuzzies.
I went home and said thank you to all the participants by posting in the various Danish WordPress groups on Facebook. I also expressed the hope that those who couldn’t attend this year would come next year. And I plugged our monthly WordPress Meetups in Copenhagen.
It was probably one of these postings that caused one of my friends on Facebook to check out my blog – and find it replaced by one of those “this site is hosted by” messages. This is where my little blog was saved.
One.com offered WordCamp attendees free hosting, and I took advantage of that over the weekend. When the redelegation came through, I thought more about my email than my blog. Thanks to my friend’s kind nudge, my site is up and running again. I said goodbye to the Beast-Blog theme by Mike Cherim that I had used for more than 7 years. It was an accessible theme, and I loved those green leaves, but it hadn’t been updated for ages, and that is a dangerous thing. Thank goodness I knew about the Blaskan (accessible) theme. I can’t talk about accessibility and not have an accessible theme!
The Danish WordPress community has always been helpful and generous in spirit. I felt like the message about my troubled blog was just one more example of how we help each other out. The episode gave me an opportunity to thank her anonymously here, announce the change on my site, and give a little shout-out to all the people I know who work with WordPress professionally or just for the sheer fun of it all.
This entire episode is almost worthy of a new Hanni Ross presentation called “How to really and truly break your blog, and how to fix it”. 🙂