Frank’s World has been online in one form or another since October 1995. In the early 2000s, I experimented with blogging. Starting in 2004, I relaunched the site as a technology blog, more specifically focused on the emergence of .NET at the time.
Since February 2004, I had blogged at least once per month, sometimes many more times than that.
However, in September 2017, ClearDB lost all of my data.
In the blink of an eye, I lost 13 years of blog posts, which amounted to 5575 posts. Andy and I recorded this podcast while the wound was still fresh.
To say that I was in a state of shock would be an understatement. I did, however, decide that I was not going to let their incompetence determine my destiny.
I took ownership of the situation: immediately rebuilding my sites what little local backups I had. After deciding that, for the most part, posts from 2008 talking about #XAML and #Silverlight were no longer of consequence, I started from a blank slate.
On that day, I set a goal of replicating the number of posts that took 13 years to make (5575) in under five years.
As of February 1st, 2022, I met that that goal.
Yes, it’s just a blog, but the fact that I was able to bounce back from this and come back better and stronger has had a profound impact on the rest of my life.
I also hope I can provide an example for others.
The point of all this is to say that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control what you do about it.
What you do in the small things foreshadows what you do in the big things.
For now, remember these three things:
1. You control nothing outside your own mind.
2. Always make sure you control your backup data stores.
3. Stay the hell away from ClearDB.
Enter the Dingo
I actually met the goal about 4 months prior to my original estimate. A lot of that was done with a tool that you may have heard me refer to as “Dingo.” Dingo was written in response to a problem I had in May 2021, where a series of events broke my streak of 100+ posts per month.
Dingo is the backbone of my “Content Ops” system and was able to help me maintain my posting cadence despite the last few months being quite the challenge.
