I seem to be getting more and more into a mess these days.

As you all know, I began blogging just for a lark. I literally jumped into the pond without knowing how to swim. Gradually, the pond became an ocean and I still didn’t know how to swim.

At best, I realised,  I had learnt how to tread water.  Slowly, I began to understand the importance of belonging to blogging groups. I understood the importance and value of commenting and visiting other people’s blogs. Social media which was such a new and repugnant idea to me became something I had to try out simply to increase footfalls.

I still haven’t figured out what SEO is. Of course I know what the acronym means but I still haven’t understood what it is all about. When blog gurus advise using key words, making a keyword bank etc, I feel that sense of panic when I jump into a strange swimming pool.

After three years of participating in the seriously challenging AtoZ challenge and participating in several smaller blog challenges conducted by Write Tribe and competitions ,etc, I thought I had really mastered it all. I was ready to take on mature students (no one likes to be called a Senior Citizen unless you are getting a discounted fare or increased bank interest). I actually envisaged writing a series of blogs aimed at this audience especially since I’d tasted mild success in the recently concluded Bar-a-thon, a blogging challenge conducted by Blog-a-Rhythm. For the first time I tried my hand at a series of stories and was quite pleased with the feed back. It seemed I had found my niche.

Alas, my bubble really burst with a bang on Sunday when I realised that all my posts for the bar-a- thon had vanished!

Yes, I kid you not, the last post you can see before this disaster was my post on 27th June. So all my good work in July is lost!

It all started like this you see.

Unlike most people, I have to blog surreptitiously. My family is extremely annoyed that I spend so much time blogging. The fact is that I spend so much time blogging because my trusty desktop shares space with a television that is showing TV serials or Food Programmes that the servants are watching. If you work in such a distracting environment, with other background sounds like drill machines making holes, stone cutters whizzing away or carpenters banging into homes that are barely forty feet away, you will find it that much harder to sort out your mind, your sentences and of course your post.

Thus I began blogging on my iPhone which is equally difficult considering the mismatch between the size of the screen and the size of my fingers.

But being brave and fearless, I persisted and brought out several posts entirely on my iPhone. Then last week I had just finished reading  Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and had very cleverly made a post combining a review of this book and my thoughts on loneliness etc for #MondayMusings. I had got everything together and pressed publish when I found that the post could neither be saved as a draft nor posted!

To make matters worse, for the past month or so I’ve been getting screens such as this on my phone when I clicked to a URL such as Link to submit a post or even if I wanted to visit some other site ( mine included)

I immediately called Apple support and figured that I needed to take a back up of my phone and restore the default settings through iTunes.

This took a whole 4 hours believe it or not because I didn’t have enough space on my own PC to downloads the updated iTunes.

Then half of yesterday I spent in backing up my iPhone on my DeskTop. And of course I re-installed the software update on my iPhone.

But that still doesn’t explain how I lost my posts does it?

My contract with my host provider webhostinghub.com was coming to a close by the middle of July. During the past one year when I became conscious of web hosting and domain hosting etc, I realised that I should have only ONE provider for both services. I asked around and out of the 11 bloggers who responded, three told me they used SiteGround. Since that seemed the most popular, I chose that especially when I was told that they were very helpful and were good about helping technically challenged people like me.

All went well till last week when after the Bar-A-Thon I decided to check on the progress of my domain and website transfer. It seemed that the transfer was done but I had to point the DNS to a new server. I did this but for some reason, it did not take. I then contacted SiteGround who said they’d do it for me.

But in this big domain pointing, it seems that the posts that I had uploaded in July remained on the server of Webhostinghub.com.

So the whole of yesterday and today, I’ve been trying to conduct two simultaneous chats with two different host providers. And this is how things stand.

SiteGround can only help me when I get the backupfiles.

Webhostinghub has sent me an email via cPanel that the files have been backed up and can be accessed from the cPanel.

But when I went to Webhosting hub, I couldn’t access my cPanel because I did not renew my contract with them.

Now I have asked Webhosting to please, please, please send me the file or at least allow me access to their cPanel where they have stored the back up of my files.

Once this is done, I will have to manually download these files to my computer and upload them to SiteGround. Good heavens…… this seems to be a looooooong haul.

My dear readers, bear with me till then. I will continue blogging despite my missing posts of July.

Ciao and wishing you a happy weekend.