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Now playing: Walk Away by Kelly Clarkson
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Have you ever changed something in your WordPress theme—or anything on your site, for that matter—and THEN realized you got rid of something you needed? I did this, just the other day, in fact. Is there a way to get it back?
I was using the Flexibility theme and had reset it to its original defaults because I felt like I needed to start fresh. The problem was I forgot to save the text for my "about my blog" box, and I really didn't want to rewrite it because I liked the original version and I knew I'd never remember it word for word. But since the reset deleted the text, it was no longer there to copy.
So I made use of a trick I've had to use more than once in the past: I pulled up Google's cached version of my site. If you're not familiar with the term "cache" as it relates to Google, here are the basics.
As Google crawls the web, it stores a snapshot of your page that can be referred to as the "cached version." This version is updated the next time the Googlebot pays a visit. However, for an undetermined period of time, the cached version can still be accessed. As you've likely deduced, the previous version of my "about this blog" box was still on the web. I just had to get at it.
There are several ways to find this cached version:
- In the Google search bar, type the following: cache:www.thesiteinquestion.com. This brings up a copy of your site showing how it looked before your most recent changes. At the top, you'll see a message telling you what date that "snapshot" was stored. I was able to select and copy the text I needed and paste it back into my theme. Actually, what I did was go to "View > Page Source" in my browser and copied the text along with the code for the links and photo so I wouldn't have to redo the code, either.
- There are also various Firefox extensions that with one click allow you to view the cached version. I use GCache. It puts a little icon on the lower right side of the browser. Click on it and it will show you the cached version of whatever page you are on at the time. Pretty cool.
- While on a search engine results page, click "Cached" underneath the listing you want to look at. An added benefit to this method is that it will highlight the search terms you used to get the results page. This comes in very handy if you visit someone's site but can't find any reference to the terms you're interested in. Just go back and hit "Cached" instead of the listing's title, and you'll be able to find all the occurrences of your search term.
These techniques also come in very handy if you want to view a certain site but it's down for some reason due to server overload or because the site owner is moving or changing things.
So don't panic if you accidentally overwrite something that you needed! This trick won't work 100% of the time (for instance, if you're unfortunate enough to receive a visit from Google since you made the mistake), but for the most part, it's a good technique to have in your arsenal.
I LOVE my “job.” Affiliate marketing takes work, but it doesn’t feel like work.
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