Remember yesterday when I wrote about having a “lazy Saturday” and how life was “good” and I was looking forward to enjoying the day?

Well forget all that. Two hours after I posted, the world fell to crap and I hated everyone and everything — except you, of course.

I was really hating my web host. It started out as my fault. Well, I guess the whole thing was my fault, but that’s beside the point.

12 noon – I went into my domain’s control panel to enable an anti-hotlinking option. When I came out of it and went to the blog, everything except the homepage was gone. *poof* It was crazy. 404 errors all over the place. I went back in and disabled the anti-hotlinking script. No change. Everything was still bye-bye. I FTPd my week-old back-up. Nothin’ doin’. I just couldn’t figure out what was causing my categories, archives and posts to disappear all of a sudden. I spent the next hour scanning the WordPress forums for the answer that did not materialize.

1:30 p.m. – I thought I had it fixed, but as soon as I cleared my cache — curses! Feeling drained and like a failure after trying everything I knew six ways from Sunday, I broke down and submitted a help ticket to my web host (siteground.com — cool people). After going back and forth for an hour, the support rep, who was also stumped, offered the option of restoring my entire blog directory — 9 MB worth of posts, comments, themes, pictures, sounds, widgets and plugins — for $29.95.

So I parted with my $30 and they did the deed. Yay. I posted that everything was fixed. I went on a hunt for a good backup program.

Then, the apocalypse.

3:15 p.m. – I went into my WordPress dashboard and re-entered some information. There’s just one small detail: I entered one reference URL wrong. Ka-blam. Chaos. Locked out of the dashboard with no way back in to fix my stupid mistake. Curses! Back to the WordPress support forums. This time, I found an answer. I went into my PHP admin panel and rooted through the database until I found the wrong URL. I fixed it and saved it. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

5:30 p.m. – I tried logging back into the WordPress dashboard. My login link took me to some weird place, far, far away. Not to my dashboard panel. I sat in silence, jaw hanging open, staring at the screen. I could not believe it. What had I done? I couldn’t think of a single thing I could have ruined. I began a frantic search for a fix. In the meantime, code was broken and themes disappeared and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. I finally got back to the login screen, but I couldn’t access it without doing a ceremonial rain dance first. The page I’d been using for nine months wasn’t logging me in correctly.

7:05 p.m. – I was just about ready to throw a tie rod. I couldn’t figure out why nothing was loading right; commands weren’t commanding.

And then I saw it.

I happened to compare my bookmark for the login site with the address in the location bar:

When Siteground did the restore, they changed the admin pages to load with the “www” intact — something I had never done since buying the domain back in February. Of course, they didn’t tell me this.

I changed my bookmark, and everything was fixed. Then I made some hot cocoa, sat downstairs with the Thriller, and thought homicidal thoughts.

And that, my fiends, was my relaxing Saturday.

Fink out.