Oops – I’m clearing out the daily Twitter updates on my blog and I realize I deleted a post I wanted to keep. I imagine there is a plug-in you can install on WordPress that helps you recover a lost post or page, but it was too late.
I do have an XML sitemap, which is in turn registered with Google’s Webmaster Tools, so I went to Google and did a site search to find it. Fortunately, I knew of a unique keyword to use in the search. Here is the search string:
Site: timmcnabb.com stlscooterguy
The “Site:” operator narrows your search to just the specified domain. Anything that follows the domain is searched for within that domain. Bingo! The original link was a 404 (naturally) but Google had a cached version of the page. I clicked on the cached link. Once on that page, I was able to “view source” and locate the exact HTML code of my post, right down to the images.
After that, it was a fairly simple matter of creating a new post and pasting that code into the new post on the HTML tab.
Now, I am glad in this situation that I was able to recover my post, but it does remind me to be circumspect in my blog posts. Even if I go off on a rant, hit “publish” and then think better of it a few days later, if Google gets hold of it, your “oops” may live long after you delete your mistake. Today is May 30, the cached version was just from May 26.



Copy your Word text and click on the editing window. Click this icon, and a window will pop up. Paste your text here then click “Insert”. It will paste your text cleanly.