I want to talk some more about my website, and if last September was version 5.0, then the version I had as of February of this year was probably about version 5.2. I had added a few extra features, some added functionality, and expanded the base. I had made extensive progress with my photo gallery, and overall, I hate to say it, but I was feeling pretty good about it. From January 2020 to February 2021, I had drastically upgraded a TON of stuff on the site, and I felt like it was generally under control.

Well, it is almost two months from the fateful day when I received the email from my hosting company’s tech support that they had run a compression option on my website AND an optimization plugin. Either one alone was enough to send me into shock as compression has NEVER worked well on my site with the plugins I run, and optimization runs by deleting orphan elements in your database. Except there’s really no such thing as a universal orphan — some plugins treat autosaves that you haven’t worked on in two weeks as orphans and wants to delete them.