When you’ve got a blog, it does seem sometimes that you’ve put all your eggs in one basket. You feel uniquely vulnerable (at least I do) and dependent on the tender mercies of Blogger.com, for instance, not to screw your blog up. And, so far (knock wood) it hasn’t.

Blogrolling.com, responsible for my blogroll, has always seemed a piece of cake. Blogrolling is one of those small housekeeping chores that are important, at least to other bloggers, and I had developed a modestly lengthy one, complete with pithy descriptions of each blog to which I’d linked (note the past tense, by the way).

Last night I was trying to add a new blog, as I’ve done so many times before with nary a hitch, when the screen suddenly read “fatal error,” a phrase I absolutely detest. Why such needlessly hysterical rhetoric on the part of a computer? I always think when I see that. Can’t you calm down?

I figured something had gone wrong with the addition of this particular link for some unknown computerish reason, some sort of little glitch. I thought I’d just come back today and fix it.

Well, lo and behold, when I returned this morning I discovered that my entire blogroll has been deleted. Gone, gonzo, zip, nada, finished, finito. The word “fatal” doesn’t seem to have been hyperbole this time, at least from the viewpoint of the blogroll itself.

I have no idea whether this blogroll assassination was due to some slip of my own fingers (I don’t think so; to delete a blogroll requires two moves, including receiving an alert that this is about to happen, and I remember seeing nothing of the sort), or whether my computer has committed an act of revenge. Probably something in between.

But apologies to all on my blogroll. This may take some days to fix.

[ADDENDUM: Wonders never cease.]