Blogging: What to Do When You Mess Up
People always ask me how I learned to do customization for my blog and for the blogs that I used to manage for Overcome Everything. Truth be told, I don’t know PHP. I can observe it and after much trial and error over the past three years, I know how to manipulate it well.
But…
That doesn’t mean that I never screw up because I do. I’ve made some horrific blunders in the past, and for a while, it would set me to sweating and biting my nails, especially if it happened on one of Tellman’s favorite blogs. (Don’t ever show him this post because he thinks I never screw up… well… not really, but he doesn’t know how badly I’ve done it in the past. Ha!)
Here’s what I do:
I make the change that I think I want. It can be anything from changing a color to customizing a header to adding a special optin form and on and on. These are simple things, really, but when you’re new and don’t know what you’re doing, you can really just blow the whole blog.
What to do?
The first thing I do is to make a copy of the original page. That way, I can always go back to the page as it was before I started messing around. This is mainly for pages that already have some degree of customization.
If the page is new, fresh out of the box… no problemo. There is always a clean copy in the files for your theme. Never delete the theme after you install it! Keep a clean copy with all the files intact for just the times when you really screw up. You can upload the clean copy and bingo! Right back where you started.
What’s the moral of the story?
Don’t be afraid to try things on your blog or with any web page. Just be sure to have a clean copy or to copy what’s there already so that you can revert to the earlier version if need be. Then, learn by OJT. Train yourself. You’ll be surprised to learn that manipulating code of any kind isn’t as hard as you may think. (Notice I said manipulate, not write. For that, I’m as clueless as the next non-programmer. 
)
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October 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm #
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Reverend Robert
October 16th, 2009 at 11:18 pm #
What is “learn by OJT?”
Pat Marcello
October 19th, 2009 at 9:47 am #
On the Job Training = OJT
- Pat