Thank you!

Posted on : June 19, 2013 By
uncategorized 

Earlier this week – Sunday night, to be precise – I lost the entire contents of my 8 year old blog called Milliblog. With an average of about 25+ posts a month since July 2005 when I started Milliblog, I had over 2500 posts! That’s something not easy to rebuild from Google Cache or Internet Archive.

Yes, I did not have a backup of the database (the wp_posts table for corrupt in the database within WordPress and decided to vanish upon my trying a repair from PHPMyAdmin!) and I was staring at the prospect of starting from scratch again, just reviewing new music from now on.

My web host is Yahoo Small Business and they have clearly mentioned in their Help that database files are not part of the backup. That was the final response I got when I called them on Monday morning, after an hour+ on hold when they tried multiple things.

I had posted my ordeal on Twitter and on Facebook and by noon even offered a reward for anyone who can restore my website despite that the fact wp_posts showed 0 (Zero!) posts!

Yahoo Care took note of the tweets and offered to help. When I called Yahoo Support again in the night, after a painful hour of holding and offering assorted details, they restored the entire site to the last date that did not show any error in the database set-up – June 2nd.

This is a very, very big deal for me! So, I don’t want to be an ungrateful wretch and forget all the support/help/suggestions (even jokes – one common joke was asking me to check with NSA 🙂 ) that poured all through the next day of my website crash. I’m very sure that the phenomenal chatter and support that resulted was in some way responsible for Yahoo to note that making this customer (me!) happy could help them win some brownie points. And yes, they clearly were out of their SLA in helping me.

So, let me make this effort in thanking every (as much as possible – or, as much as I can search) person who pitched in to help that day. I’m sure this is a boring post to most of you, but this is much more than a blog post to me – it is a reminder of how much I have gained from blogging in all these years.

And the reason why this post is on this blog and not on Milliblog, where the action was – one, most of the responses were on Twitter for the ID named after this blog. Two, this is hardly about music (more about the blog that had music reviews) and I felt this may seem odd in that blog, in terms of continuity. This blog anyway talks a LOT about social media and much of what you below is from social media.

Here is the list of people who wrote to me, via multiple tools online, with one instance of the conversation, just to get their name in the list. This compilation (or curation, since this is not merely a dump of all replies) took a lot of time last night, but that’s the least I can do to show my gratitude for staying with me through the ordeal. As I mentioned in one of my tweets… I started my blog in 2005 and that makes it – almost like – my 2nd born… so, it is only fair that I thank everyone who helped, in any small way, personally.

On email/phone: KS Nagarajan, Ramkumar Gokarnesan, Gagandeep Singh Sapra, Pratik Shah, Harsh Agrawal, Piyush Kumar, Yaju Arya and Aditya Grandhi.

On Milliblog’s Facebook page:

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On Twitter (besides the 66 people who retweeted and helped spread the word):

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