After Alan opened our blog page this morning, we had 39 minutes of complete and utter frustration when he realized that our background color had spontaneously changed to a solid black.

I immediately jumped onto my laptop and checked for myself. Black.

I tried changing the background in the custom appearance area on the back end, nothing changed. We both logged into alternate Internet applications, I checked Safari, Alan checked Firefox. Black.

I doubled checked that the theme “Delicious Magazine” that we bought for the blog was still active and hadn’t been retired. Nope, still good – though now $15 more than when we purchased it five years ago.

I went to wordpress.org and searched “Delicious Magazine” to make sure that it wasn’t theme related. Nope.

I left a post in the forum for help from whomever may have experienced this before.

I checked the support tab and did a search for “background has changed to black.” A half dozen articles popped up and I read the first one. It walked me through a trouble-shooting routine that did not fix the problem, but left me feeling hopeful that one of the other articles may help. They did, though not in fixing the problem.

Reading through all the information helped to calm me down and realize that today people are having a much harder time with their blogs than I. While taking a “timeout” from the support page, I remembered what we learned at a WordPress Conference we attended in Reno when we first started blogging. When all else fails, calm down and try the simple things first.

So I went back into the appearance screen and once again selected background. Then i clicked on the “default” button for the background. The preview didn’t change, but I selected the “save and update” button at the top of the page. Then I closed out of the program and the browser.

Next I reopened the browser and the blog home page, then before it loaded I hit the “control” + “R” command that the support page suggested. This forces the page to refresh after reconnecting to the hosting site.

This is what we woke up to . . . arggghh.

After 39 minutes of frustration and 3 minutes of calm assurance, when the homepage came back up, the background was correct. Yeah!