Just for your future reference, Tash, it is not a good idea to decide to upgrade your Wordpress installation at 10 o’clock at night.  At that stage of the evening, you’re already tired and you can too easily get distracted by catch-up episodes of The Sarah Jane Chronicles, starring David Tennant.  And if you’re tired – even if you’ve done the same Wordpress upgrade before – you can easily stuff things up.

You might overwrite key files, for example, and then when you go to your admin screen to log on, you might get a blank white page – and when you go to your homepage, the same thing.  Trying to stay calm, you might then try to do a fresh install, knowing that you’ve exported all your blog entries to an .xml file earlier in the evening, only to find that the .xml file only contains the first and most recent entry.

By this time it’d be after midnight and you’d be coming to the realisation that you’d deleted your entire blog.  And while it didn’t contain the best literature ever, it did have a couple of entries on the excitement of first-time publication, which you would’ve preferred not to lose.  So you’ll find yourself searching the Way Back Machine for an archived copy of your entries which you can then bring into your ‘new’ blog.  And you’ll keep bringing in entries, one at a time, till about 1.30am, and then you’ll get up at 6.00am to finish the job (finish republishing those blog entries at least, though you’ll still need to deal with the sidebar, theme, plugins and comments).

Which means  by 11.30pm the next day, having just returned from Boffoonery, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park aimed at the kind of people who work all day with computers and then enjoy going out in the evenings to hear jokes about code (so like you and your husband and your friends), you’ll be totally exhausted and reduced to amusing yourself by writing notes in the second person.

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