Of XMLs, dotcom woes, and point ohs

Welcome back to La Familia Viajera!

We haven't been blogging for the past several weeks. The last official blogpost we had was about our impromptu visit to historic Calle Escolta in Binondo, Manila last November 30. (thankfully we did a photo ops in front of the old PNB headquarters before it was mysteriously gutted away by fire just last week). I posted that visit last December 3. Then after that, nothing else followed. Our beloved family travel blog was also gutted away not by fire but clumsiness.

www.lafamiliaviajera.com is no more. =(

It's all my fault. I totally forgot about the one-year deal that I signed up for with our internet domain registrar. I didn't know that they've been sending us several emails reminding us that the deal is about to expire. The problem is I've been too busy taking care of other troubles that I failed to check my emails for weeks on end (learn from my mistake, fellow online being). I just found out about the bad news when one cold day in December, as I was about to blog about a Christmas party we attended in Parañaque, our site's URL led me to nothing but a network error.

More than a year's worth of blogposts... all gone!

However, I was a bit surprised to notice that it was Yeyette who was more disappointed than me. She has learned to love this blog so much. Rightly so because La Familia Viajera is virtually a repository of our family's travel memories. And it's nice to see our kids growing up with each blogpost and at different places.

It was too late to contact and make an appeal to our internet domain registrar, so I just decided to start from scratch. No use crying over spilled milk. Thankfully, we still have all photographs of our travels stored in our Facebook page.

And so that should explain why our URL now is http://lafamiliaviajera2015.blogspot.com. And that should also explain why last Monday's blogpost sounds as if we're starting over again.

Inside the San Agustín Museum in Intramuros last January 11 (click here for the complete photo album).

Good thing I remembered the time when good 'ol buddy Arnaldo taught me how to import and export a blog's XML a few year's ago (he too had experienced a rather similar fiasco with his blog). And last Monday morning, it occurred to me that although "version 1.0" of La Familia Viajera was no longer around, the Gmail account attached to it could still be accessed. And through it, I could still access the blog's dashboard where I could export version 1.0's XML! And that's exactly what I did. After downloading the XML, I logged in to "version 2.0" and imported the whole thing (for fellow bloggers using Blogger, click here for the procedure).

¡Gracias a Dios! Versions 1.0 and 2.0 were merged yesterday!

And thank goodness that technology is siding with us. So grateful are we that is why we insist on using "version-digit-point-ohs" (and it makes me sound techie, hehe!). The downside here is that we no longer own the domain name. But that's OK. Might as well keep things simpler (something I learned from Traveler On Foot). Yeyette is still intent of buying a domain for this site, but it's not one of my priorities. I'll just leave it up to her.

The most important thing is that La Familia Viajera is back to regular programming! BIGGER! BETTER! Simpler! =)

¡Vamos a viajar!