On Wednesday night/Thursday morning, around 3am, I almost deleted my blog! The picture above represents perfectly how I felt at that moment.
Around 10pm Wednesday night, I was happily scrolling through my Twitter feed, not a care in the world, when one of my pre-scheduled tweets for the day's new post happened to pop up. Bear in mind this tweet, or a variation of it, had been going out once an hour since 10am. Something looked weird about it, and as I looked I realised to my horror the link to the post was wrong!
Through the day I had noticed the views the post was getting were a lot less than a new post normally gets, but I put it down to the fact the post was a reflection piece on the A to Z challenge I had just completed - maybe it was only of interest to other people who had completed the challenge? My other posts were getting viewed so I hadn't been overly worried. It didn't even occur to me to check the link I was posting - talk about a rookie mistake!
After the initial shouting, swearing and generally morphing into a crazy person, I took a deep breath sent out a couple of frantic tweets explaining what had happened and told myself it couldn't get any worse. I didn't know the universe was going to take that as a challenge!
I've hearing a lot recently about Google Analytics and been meaning to give it a try. I figured now was a good a time as any - maybe I would get some useful insights as to how badly the link issue had affected the day!
I went off and looked into it. I wasn't prepared for how much of a mammoth task it was going to be. Seriously, if you're blog is still relatively new, and you think there's even the tiniest chance you might want to use this feature in the future, I would highly recommend you start now.
The site generates a bit of code which, unless you are a confident enough web designer to embed this in the mainframe of the website, (which I am not so much can go wrong fiddling about with this if you are not 100% sure of what you are doing) you then need to go paste the bit of code into every single blog post and every single page.
As it's now getting on for 1am, I had nothing better to do so off I went, on my pasting journey. Now for most of my posts and all of my pages, this was uneventful - edit, HTML, paste, update, move on. A little boring, but simple enough.
However, for around 10 posts (I still don't know why these were different, or what happened) pasting in the code somehow made my blog decide these were new posts, which had to be displayed right at the top of my blog with a time code that said they had just been published! And of course, they had to be the oldest posts, some of them about topical things that are by now three months out of date!
Luckily, of all the posts this happened to, only one had comments on (if someone has taken the time to write a comment, deleting that post seems awfully rude) and they were so old, they probably bore no relevance to my blog today. So I deleted them. It wasn't something I wanted to do and I was unhappy about it to say the least, but needs must I suppose.
So code added, old posts deleted I eagerly went off to check my analysis - and it hadn't worked. The last two hours of pasting in code had all been in vain, I had deleted posts for nothing! It just wasn't worth it! It was the final straw in a day of blogging mishaps, and I went back to my blog with the full intention of deleting it altogether and putting the whole blogging thing down to experience - I figured if that many things went wrong all at once, I clearly wasn't cut out for this. I was over it and I was done with it!
Something stopped me - I don't know what, maybe the thought of all the hours of work that went into it, maybe the fact that analysing my stats wasn't that big a deal, I'm not sure, but I decided to close down, and if I still felt the same way the next morning I would delete it then and not look back.
Thursday morning came around, and I had had a change of heart. I put on my big girl pants, and gave myself a right good talking to. I'm not one for spitting my dummy out, and in that moment I didn't like how easily I was willing to quit (I'm detoxing this week, so maybe it was lack of carbs and sugar making me a bit irritable?).
I decided to pop back to Google Analytics, and see if I had missed any steps, if not, I would delete the code from all the posts and live without the stats!
I opened the site, and lo and behold, there it was - my first report. Somehow I had managed to miss the part where it says the first report can take up to 24 hours to generate! I'm glad I added the analytics and I would recommend it if you just want an in depth look at the demographic of your readers. But I urge you to read it all properly first!
I really can't believe how close I came to throwing in the towel because of a few set backs. I'm glad the rational part of mind eventually put in an appearance and stopped me deleting it - I how would have been gutted Thursday morning if I'd have gone through with it.
So what have I learned from this?
1. Sometimes, you are going to have days like this one. When it gets to the point where you are this angry, nothing is going to go right, and the smallest thing will feel like the end of the world. Walk away. Switch the computer off and don't go back until you are in a better frame of mind.
2. Never give up! In the moment, you will want to - that feeling won't last forever, just wait it out!
3. Never make decisions in anger! I already knew this one, but that night sure brought it home to me!
Sometimes, you just have to remember my favourite saying - worse things happen at sea!
Have you had a day like this? How did you overcome it?
Follow me on Twitter @randommusings29 and feel free to comment :)
