The Bug In My Blog

Books By Patti Liszkay
Available On Amazon

​​"Equal and Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
​Available on Amazon.

​THE BUG IN MY BLOG

     There's a bug in my blog.
      I discovered the bug one day while I was scrolling back through my archives and noticed that in a post from February, 2020 in which I described a dinner I had at a Chicago pizzeria, where there was supposed to be a photo of people sampling beers there was instead a photo of trees in my neighborhood that belonged in a different blog:

    A little farther down that same post there was a photo of me baking where there was  supposed to be a photo of my daughter and me walking around Chicago:

       I scrolled to the previous post about a couple of kind Chicagoans helping me with my luggage at the Metro station and discovered this photo of my sister baking in my kitchen:

         I began looking through random past posts and to my horror found:
​        This,  in a post on my niece's wedding where there was  supposed to be a picture of friends and family setting up for the ceremony:

...and this photo from a blog on the Columbus Franklin Park Conservatory that replaced the photo of the wedding party walking down the aisle:

...and these pictures in a post where pictures of my grandchildren's dog were supposed to be:

...and this picture that was from a blog about my granddaughters playing in my backyard stuck in a different blog next to a description of a Vegan Power Salad:

...and these pictures in a blog on my 50th high school reunion where pictures of my classmates were supposed to be:

       You get the picture. The messed-up picture.
       Frantic, I called my sister, who is a computer engineer. 
       "Sounds like your website's server has a corrupted disk," said my sister. This meant nada to me, except that I had no doubt that any disk that would wantonly mix up my photos and maliciously mess up my blog posts must have been corrupted. 
        My sister explained that this unscrupulous disk was randomly shuffling my pictures around, and likely wouldn't even drop the same picture in the same spot twice. 
         "What do I do?" I moaned.
       My sister suggested I contact my website server. Which I should have done right away, but didn't. I think I was afraid that if I contacted my web server - Weebly - they might tell me "Eh, tough luck" and then I'd be hopeless. So instead of doing the sensible thing - contacting Weebly - I kept sifting through old blogs, hoping to find evidence that the disk had rehabilitated itself. Instead I continued to find this sort of thing:
      On a blog about a demonstration in support of refugees:      

...on a blog I wrote about me trying to install a bidet I'd bought:

...on a blog where I had posted a photograph of a piece of paper I still had from my childhood on which I had written the Catholic Holy Days of Obligation:

...on a blog about a book talk I gave:

         I couldn't stand it.
     I contacted Weebly via a chat app on the website. The friendly tech knew exactly what my problem was. He informed me that in order to stop the picture-shuffling I needed to go through every blog and download every photograph to my computer. I then needed to give every down-loaded photo a name, save it with this name, then replace each photo on every blog with the re-named copy. Then the server would no longer confuse the pictures, as each one would have a different name.
          I kinda got what he was talking about. I asked him why I had to do this; was there some kind of bug in the server? He typed this answer:
​        ​"Yeah, actually we do have a bug on that, my advance team is working to fix that problem as soon is possible, but they just confirm me that you are not going to have any problem with what you are trying to do, as soon my advance team resolve this problem i can send you an email to let you know." 
          That was a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't gotten the email announcing that Weebly has recovered from its bug. The server must have a case of long-haul disk corruption.
          In any case, I have since then been working backwards, going through every post from every month of every year, naming, saving, and re-posting every picture that is correct. I'll then have to go back and deal with all the pictures that are wrong, either replacing them with the correct pictures, if I can find the correct pictures from my old camera memory cards, or deleting them. 
          Since starting this gargantuan  project I've come to realize something kind of amazing: How many pictures I post. It's not uncommon to see that I've posted over fifty pictures on a blog. On some blogs I've posted over a hundred.
           So I have my work cut out for me, and even though my daughter Theresa is helping me when she can,       

...I expect I'll be slogging away at fixing my blog for the rest of my days.
      Anyway, the reason I'm sharing all this - well, besides that I share, you know, all kinds of things - is so that if someone goes back to look at an old blog post and sees a ridiculous photo that doesn't at all match the narrative, they'll know I'm not crazy. Just REALLY bugged.