One might ask the author of this page (indeed, many have asked) what system is used to maintain the Ideapad: how data is entered, stored, and retrieved.

The answer: Ten fingers and BBEdit.

Updating netWert the old-fashioned way has served the site well for years. Why get caught up in a complex data-entry system and hard-to-understand software when these pages are just words, type cut copy paste link, and when the author knows HTML so well he can glance at a magazine spread and lay it out as a Web page in his head? Sure, it requires popping in manual code to break paragraphs and make links, but that’s a no-brainer after all this time.

Smarty-pants text boy learned a hard lesson when he obliterated his layoff essay Tuesday morning.

The missing essay was a result of an awkward pasting error, the details of which need not be recanted here. Fortune intervened, for a change, because the essay was written at home, the night before, and emailed to a Yahoo account, where it was re-retrieved and reposted today, albeit in a slightly different form than the initial one, because the edits disappeared with Tuesday’s misstep. It’s got a new title, too — “Gut Check” — because said error-prone site author does not have a good enough memory to recall the original.

This is a long way of saying that a portion of the weekend will be spent designing a custom interface for netWert’s forthcoming content management system, designed by a friend who enjoys doing this sort of thing for sport for no apparent reason, a UI for the PHP CMS, if you will. And in a few weeks there will be no more missing essays.

Until the database crashes.