This should not have been so easy. Having a love/hate relationship with the wizard behind the curtain that makes this blog run, I was totally expecting to embark on an adventure without end, one marked by wrong turns, erroneous Internet advice and little support when I finally decided to restart this blog with a clean slate. Instead, it took less than four hours last weekend to get things back up and running. Well, most of it.

To provide some background, during the last few months I’ve become better acquainted with my host’s support staff than I ever wanted to be. Invariably, each email began with some mention of “excessive usage.” First it was brute-force attacks, then a wonky plugin.

Next came fear. Fear that the next post would spike my usage, earning a prolonged shut down of my site. Fear that I’d lose every post and image uploaded since 1997.

Then I got over myself. The wife had been patiently listening to my grunts, ramblings and cursing for much too long. It was time to do something. Anything.

Most anyone will first search Google, through which you will find contradictory advice on how to handle restarting a self-hosted WordPress blog from zero. After too much time spent looking for the right advice, I just dove in, accepting that it’d either be a surprising success or fantastic failure. I backed up the data, wiped the directory clean, reinstalled WordPress with a new theme, and imported the previously backed up data.

And here we are, up and running. Mostly.

All the words are back. The photos, not so much. (I blame much of the increase in CPU and memory usage on a gallery plugin previously employed, a plugin that became bloated when commercialized.)

The biggest benefit is that everything under the hood is current and up to date. It’ll be a few weeks before all of the photos are restored, but I figure that few folks are interested in my history.

After all, blogs are generally about moving forward, one new post at a time, aren’t they?