Dad phoned me last night. His blog is powered via Blogger, and he noticed just yesterday that the introduction of the new Google Blogger had stopped his Haloscan comments working properly. He’s not very good with the technical web stuff, so whenever he has a problem, he calls me. In the past I’ve redesigned and recoded the site, added in links, updated his archives, and put in a comments system for him.

With him on the phone, I looked into the problem, and discovered that I’d have to switch him over to the page elements style of Blogger, which meant losing his design. Then I had to add in all his links MANUALLY, all 35 of them, get his Haloscan working again, and add in his profile section too. All in all, we were on the phone for 1 hour, 2 minutes.

This evening, he phoned me again.
“Hello, my favourite daughter,” he greeted me.
“Ok, what do you want?” I replied.
(I know him too well)

He said he’d noticed his counter and stats links were gone. He’d forgotten about them when I was reconfiguring the site last night.

“Oooh,” I said. “Might be a problem there, don’t think I kept that information.”
“Oh, no,” he groaned.
“Let me see what I can do,” I said.

As it happened, I already knew I had the info. I’d deleted the backup I made, but it was still in my desktop trash can. Thankfully, it didn’t take over an hour this time. I think I’m going to get him this book.