greymatter for stupids.

June 1, 2005 5:46 PM

I'm an idiot: did I just lose part of my website forever? [Greymatter Issues]

OK, so I am working on cobbling together my first site. And I was just cutting and pasting the html for the left and right columns of my main page into the corresponding Greymatter template fields, hit save, reloaded my site, and the columns were empty. Went back to the template page, and the fields are now blank. What did I do and how do I fix it? I feel like a big dork.

posted by ITheCosmos to technology (5 comments total)

To answer your question succinctly: I don't know.

If you did lose what you were working on, you can always re-construct it from scratch. It's a pain, but I find that I always improve things the second time around.

Also, you've learned a fundamental lesson of web design and weblogging: ALWAYS save your work. ALWAYS.

It seems that 25% of the time when I don't save my work, something goes wrong and I lose a template or a weblog entry or, worse, a whole subsection of my site.

Saving your work (and/or making backups) is the #1 skill to learn for moving files back-and-forth on the web.
posted by jdroth at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2005

Also, I really don't suggest doing any kind of intensive work inside browser form textboxes for this very reason. Copy it all out and paste it into Notepad or TextEdit, work on a local copy, then paste it back in when you're done.
posted by odinsdream at 6:14 PM on June 1, 2005

Check to see if a part of the code is stored in the clipboard by pasting to notepad (or equivalent), if you haven't tried that already. Another idea is hit the back button to the point you added the code, it just might be there if you didn't close the tab or browser altogether.
posted by squeak at 6:17 PM on June 1, 2005

Once while working on the html in a template, I thought I'd lost some stuff forever, but was able to get it back using google's cache of the page.

Use of the phrase "my first site" suggests that it wasn't online where it could be cached in the first place...but, on the long-shot that you were cobbling together something using your html from another blog/journal-type page, I thought I'd mention it.
posted by PY at 6:42 PM on June 1, 2005

When Greymatter builds your site it creates a set of static HTML files. If you had previously built the site successfully using this HTML you might be able to copy it out of those files. If you already republished everything you are out of luck, though.

(refrains from asking if Greymatter is the correct software choice)
posted by babar at 8:43 PM on June 1, 2005