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God Bless Google

In the past few days, I noticed something very odd. See, I use StatCounter to watch the people who come onto my blog. On Monday the statistics suddenly cut off. No one, I saw, had been to my blog since updating the template to allow for 74s with comments. This was especially bewildering when I started getting notifications of comments- title="The Long Friday">how could there be comments if no one had visited? I just figured it out now. Yep, it's every computer user's favorite scenario- at 2:30 in the morning, I realized that the entire second half of my blog's code was missing. The sidebars were gone. Blogger, understandably, has no recovery feature when it comes to templates. And it took me many hours to get that just right, so you'd better believe I was in full-on panic mode. (The reason I'd lost the statistics is that the statistics-collecting script was at the very end of the page.)

I hurriedly wrote up a "For Now", just in case anyone popped up in the 12 hours or so it might take to completely rewrite the second half of my template. Now, I've been using a program called Google Desktop for a while now. Its main feature is giving instantaneous search of everything on your hard drive, which I've found is much more convenient than using the start menu. It also has all sorts of other features I now can't do without, but I digress. Anyway, it searches everything- files, e-mails, shortcuts, and all the web pages you've been to. In order to do this, it archives everything. The second thing I did on discovering the damage to my blog was search Google Desktop for "Edit Template". To my astonishment and extreme gratitude (which you can probably guess based on the way I sound like a walking advertisement for Google right now), it had saved every version of the template, going back to October. And what really took me aback was that it didn't just save the format of the page, but saved the important part- the part written into the form. I wouldn't have expected the archive to be so thorough.

But it is, and the blog is saved, and I am saved, and I am filled with gratitude to the good programmers at Google. Now all we need is an operating system from them, and the world will be a happier place.