Welcome (back!)

Rebirth – 

“As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks—on your body or on your heart—are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

– Anthony Bourdain

A (hard) lesson in blogging

A couple months ago I had a crisis.

I had just gotten back from a trip to Singapore and Philippines and was going to write up a short summary of the trip highlights when I realized my blog site, KeepItSambal, was down.  It turns out I had neglected to renew my domain and hosting subscription this year and all of my content had been deleted.

So 2 years of posts, pictures, and content were all gone. 

I figured, “okay, no big deal, this has all got to be backed up on the old server as it’s only been a couple weeks since it expired”.

It turned out that the server was not backed up (which apparently, sometimes happens) and so none of the material could be retrieved.  I wrote mostly all the blog articles on wordpress and so without a hosting server literally everything was gone.

Well, that royally sucks. I was depressed.  2 years into the Keep It Sambal food blog and all my stories and posts were gone.  Forever.  Approximately 20 posts and 13 countries.

It was all my fault in not renewing or backing up my content somewhere safe, but I got lured into thinking hosting sites keep the data on backed up servers where you could always retrieve it.  At least for a couple months, I figured,  after a subscription expired.  I guess the Guam island life had crept up into my blog management.

My (flawed) thinking was this is 2019 and anything put up on the internet could always be retrieved.  Not the case with obscure food blogs on a budget server in Texas, I found out.

NEW START

Now what?  Well the purpose of this blog was never intended to be huge ad machine or internet click bait, but rather a place to document all my crazy adventures around the world (most Asia) and share some great food along the way.   Mainly for friends and family as a way to check in on me and hopefully inspire people to try new foods.

With that mission in mind, I’m not planning on slowing down anytime soon on my world travelling and plan to keep finding kick ass food along the way.

KeepItSambal is back!

Going forward I’m not going to focus on the content and web design so much but rather try and keep more regular updates on food I’ve tried and tie it in with travel stories.

I’ll still try and make this blog informative for people to learn about new foods and a place to go to get some recommendations for travelling.   I know I always appreciate reading tips and travel reviews when planning for a trip itinerary.   But the focus will of course be on food; icluding recipes, culture, restaurants, etc.

Alright now that I’ve gotten this monkey off my back in the BLOG RESTART, let’s go eat!