I made a brief post about this on the Facebook page, but I didn’t go into a lot of detail so I’ll try to explain what happened and what is going on now. Bear with me.

Previously, I had hosting associated with the domain name debslosingit.com and in that hosting I had a WordPress MU installation. MU lets you host multiple sites under a single installation.  One of the secondary sites under it was this one, and I used a domain mapping plug in to make it appear that Kittyloaf Designs was under its own hosting package. For the most part it looked great and I’m betting you were none the wiser. Everything looked great.

Then I decided that my personal blog, which was housed under the debslosingit.com domain name wasn’t something I wanted to continue any longer so I opted to stop paying for it and let it expire. That meant I needed to switch the primary domain on my hosting to the kittyloafdesigns.com one, which was done quickly and easily.

Before that was done, I removed the domain mapping plug in from my WordPress installation so it wouldn’t cause any problems. Unfortunately I think it did something to my site so that even when it was removed, everything was redirected back to debslosingit.com which of course no longer existed. And because everything redirected, I had no way to access the back end of my site to try to fix it. My web host was at a loss and I couldn’t find anything to help me fix it. I was extremely upset and freaking out. Aside from all of the work involved to recreate the site, there was also the matter of getting my permalinks in the same style or I would lose all of my search engine rankings I’d grown in the last 5 years or so.

I (luckily before anything was changed) ended up making back-ups of my shop items, orders, posts, and pages, and literally deleting everything and starting over from nothing. I spent most of Tuesday re-uploading all of the images to my shop because while all the prices, descriptions, and other info was there in my export files, photos were not. I was upset and exasperated but I finally got everything except for 4 items straightened out, which have been temporarily reduced to drafts until I can sort out their photos.

I’m still working on re-uploading the blog photos and I’m almost half finished. I’m not in such a rush to do them because ultimately they aren’t as important but I do expect to have them finished by the week’s end. I’m also trying to look at the good side of this. My hosting and domain bills will go down this renewal because this year I’m letting two domains go (debslosingit.com and debsinstitches.com) and if I’m lucky, I won’t need as much storage space and can downgrade my hosting plan as well. I’m seeing a lot of my images were uploaded twice, and many images for items I may have sold were never removed from the site, adding lots of megs of files I didn’t need.

Anyway, thanks for listening, and I hope that explains any weirdness you’ve seen in the site over the last few days. I’m working on it!