It’s Just One of Those Days

Author:

Do you ever have them? You know, where it’s just one thing after another. They don’t have to be big things either, it’s just that your day seems to be full of them.

Oh don’t worry, you’re not alone

Let me tell you about mine. It all started way back last fall when I decided to move my blog from Sweaty Shop to here. I imported a bunch of posts including my series on How to setup your own WordPress blog and forum.

I knew that there was one or two pictures that were wrong, but I wasn’t too worried about it. I’d fix it “sooner or later”. Well it was “later” obviously, last week to be specific. So I sat down to devote the half hour or so I guessed it would take to find the right picture and put it in.

HA!

If only I had known

I discovered there were a couple of them out of place. No big deal, right? I’d just get them taken care of. Can you guess just how many pictures were wrong? One picture in one post and THREE ENTIRE POSTS (out of 13) had the wrong pictures. And these were posts with LOTS and LOTS of pictures, because I was walking people through a process step-by-step.

In case you don’t recall, or are new enough not to know, when I originally wrote those posts on a different blog, I lost the posts, the eBook I created from the posts and some additional content, and the original word processor documents that were the manuscript for the eBook. I eventually recovered the posts, text-wise, and found a copy of the eBook so I went about reverse engineering it, taking the pictures out of the eBook and putting them into the posts.

Somewhere along the line, without realizing it… somehow… I messed up on the names of the photos. I felt really stupid and wondered how much of an amateur people thought I was.

So I sat down with my eBook in one window and my blog post(s) in the other window and compared them, every single post and page, one-by-one, side-by-side.

To make matters worse

I was missing a picture in the eBook, but I had the picture on my hard drive. No idea how that happened.

So to make the problem clear, I had all the right pictures, it’s just that they had wrong names. Each picture had another picture’s name to be exact. So I would scroll through my pictures, find the right picture, find the right name (which was on a different picture) and swap them.

The wrong picture/right name did not belong to the right picture/wrong name, but I couldn’t worry about that. Well I could have, but I chose not to. I simply swapped them so I had the right picture/right name and the wrong picture/wrong name became a new right picture/wrong name for somewhere else in one of the messed up posts.

It was a lot of work

I knew that eventually every picture would have the right name. I uploaded the pictures as I fixed them so that I wouldn’t miss any, refreshed the screen to make sure it went where it was supposed to, and moved on to the next problem.

It took many many hours spread over two days to fix them.

I then converted the eBook into a Word document and fixed the picture and now I am going through the document, fixing errors and reformatting, so that I can re-release the eBook.

Things happen. You get through it. But boy it certainly was frustrating at the time. It burned me out for a bit.

– Jeffery