The Night My Web Page Disappeared

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THE NIGHT MY WEB PAGE DISAPPEARED
Fourteen months of work, one click, and what I'd tell you to do tonight

My name is Kristie Mathis. I'm 20, I take classes at a community college in north Texas, and I work at a feed store, which means I know more about mineral blocks than anybody you've ever met. For fourteen months I had a web page about my Quarter Horse mare, Dixie. It was thirty-one pages long. It had her story, a training diary I'd kept every single month since March 1998, our barrel race times, her feed and her farrier schedule, and a guestbook with people in it from eleven states and Australia.

On Tuesday, May 18, 1999, at about 11:40 at night, I deleted all of it.

WHAT HAPPENED

I had all my pages in a folder called dixie in the GeoCities.us File Manager. I also had a folder called dixieold where I kept drafts and pages I'd replaced, and it was getting messy, so that night I decided to clean house. I checked the box next to the folder I wanted gone. I clicked Delete. It asked me if I was sure. I was sure.

I had checked the wrong box.

I went to look at my page to admire how tidy everything was, and got a page saying the file wasn't found. I sat there looking at it for a long time. Then I checked my computer for my copies, and that's when it really hit me, because there weren't any. I had built every one of those thirty-one pages in the Basic HTML Editor, typing right into my browser. It's a great little editor and it's not its fault. But when you build that way, the only copy of your page is the one on the server. When that copy's gone, it's gone. There's no Recycle Bin in the File Manager.

I cried. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. Then I went out to the barn at midnight and told Dixie, who was not very interested, and then I came back in and started making a list of everything I could remember.

WHAT I GOT BACK

Almost nothing, at first. My friend's little brother, who is fourteen and knows everything, showed me that Netscape keeps copies of pages you've looked at lately in a Cache folder on your computer, with scrambled names. We went through it file by file and found my front page and two months of the training diary. Everything else I'd looked at too long ago.

The only other thing that survived was my guestbook, because it lived on somebody else's computer through a free guestbook service. That was dumb luck, not planning.

The rest I'm typing back in from memory, from my paper training log, and from the race results in the back of my vet binder. Here's where I am:

REBUILT: 12 OF 31 PAGES

Every page gets typed on my own computer, saved on two floppies, and only then put back up. The first one back online is the start of Dixie's page. The rest are on my computer and go up as they're finished.

DO THESE THINGS TONIGHT

I'm not writing this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm writing it so it doesn't happen to you. Every one of these is something I didn't do.

1	Keep every page on your own computer, and on a floppy. Your page on the Web should be a copy of the one on your computer, not the only one. If you've been building in the Basic HTML Editor like I was, that's fine, just save a copy of each page to your computer every time you change it. Then copy the whole folder onto a floppy and put the floppy somewhere that isn't next to the computer. My whole site, pictures and all, would have fit on one floppy with room to spare. Floppies cost less than a bale of hay.

2	File, Save As gets the words, not the pictures. If your pages are only on the server, you can open each one in your browser and choose File, Save As, and that saves the HTML. But it doesn't save the pictures. You have to save those one at a time: right-click each picture and choose Save Image As (on a Mac, click and hold). If you have a lot of files, an FTP program like WS_FTP will download your whole folder at once. The settings are on the File Manager page: the host is ftp.geocities.us, and your user ID and password are your member name and password.

3	Save your guestbook. I got lucky. Don't count on luck. I learned this from Jerry Dietz's Free Stuff Test Bench, where he tested free guestbooks for seven months and one of them lost all its entries once. His advice is to open your guestbook once a month and choose File, Save As, because it takes ten seconds and it's the only copy you control. I do it on the first of every month now, when I pay the farrier.

4	Write down your member name and password. On paper, somewhere safe, not taped to the monitor. Mine is in the back of my vet binder now, with Dixie's papers. You won't remember it in a year, and if your computer dies you'll need it to get to your own page.

5	Look twice before you click Delete. Then look a third time. Read the name of the thing you checked out loud. And never, ever clean house after eleven o'clock at night. Name your folders so they don't look alike, too. dixie and dixieold look a lot alike at 11:40.

That's it. It takes one evening to do all five, and about ten minutes a month to keep them up. I'd give a lot to have that evening back.

AND IF IT ALREADY HAPPENED

Don't do anything else on your computer until you've looked in your browser's cache folder. In Netscape, the folder's name is Cache, and it's in with your Netscape user files. The newest files are your best bet. Open them in Notepad and look for your own words. Then get out every scrap of paper you have and start typing. You'll be surprised what you remember. And it will be better the second time. Mine is.

My old counter was at 9,412 when it disappeared with everything else.
This one started over at zero on June 1:

Write me, especially if this happened to you too:
[email protected]

Last updated Wednesday, September 22, 1999
(and backed up the same night, on two floppies)