The site has been down a while, almost 2 weeks. After all that down time it comes back and is all weird? What the heck?
My site is hosted by a service called WingSix. I’ve had a pretty good history with them, however in this one case they have let me down a bit. When I first started my own website on my own domain, I used ServerCentral. They were, and are awesome. At one point they decided to split up their business into what is basically the very high end of hosting (co-location and such), and the lower-end regular user stuff (shared hosting and VPS). This lower-end division was created as WingSix.
For quite some time WingSix and I got along famously. We had a few bumps and oddities come up, but all in all it was great. Eventually for some reason ServerCentral decided to sell off the WingSix division. I have no idea why, but what the heck, that is how this business works. For months things seemed to be cruising along just fine until a couple of weeks ago. Then it happened.
One day I went to check something on my site, and it wouldn’t come up. So I called in and was told that there was an issue, and that they were working on it. They then told me they had a blog that I could check in on, so I checked in on it, noticed it had an RSS feed, and subscribed. The next two updates were not promising. Ultimately there are three posts about the issue (1, 2, 3). All said and done, all the data from the system is gone, and so are all sites hosted on it.
I called in, was told a new system would be set up for me from scratch, and waited. After a few days I emailed again and waited some more. Finally last night I got annoyed and called. I was told my ticket was accidentally overlooked, and apologized to profusely. My account details were sent to me within the hour (much less than an hour actually).
So what does this mean? All the old posts and articles are currently gone. I have almost all of them on my laptop, but I’m not sure if I will repost them. The blog posts are mostly stupid or pointing to new picture updates, and most of the articles are pretty stale due to changes in technology or the issues they were meant to address.
The pictures. This is one place where I’m very lucky. I decided a couple of month ago to start using Flickr rather than my own Gallery to manage my photos. This started making sense to me for a lot of different reasons. But basically here is the rub, all the ‘Parr Family Photos’ are on Flickr. Not all are accessible by the public yet as I make them public after making sure all the photos are tagged. But they are all there and not completely lost. The Theatre/Dance/Tech/Root Beer/anything else photos are gone. Most of them the originals were already lost in a disk failure, so they are really and truly gone until I can come up with enough cash to do a data recovery on that drive. Not near future though.
As for the site itself. Well I have been thinking a lot for the last few months about how the site is set up, the software it uses, and how it can and does integrate into other services. Basically I was kind of stuck. I wanted to upgrade my Drupal software, but the process to upgrade everything around it (Gallery, modules, etc) to ensure nothing blew up was monumental. Drupal is an awesome platform, but I don’t get paid for doing this site, so the level of management and development it requires is just not justifiable.
As such I’m trying an experiment. I’ve installed the latest Wordpress. With it I’ve installed a few plug-ins to integrate into Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. So if I update my Facebook status, non-facebook users can see it on the side of my site. If I put something here, or on twitter, it shows up in both places. Soon I will setup Facebook to grab the RSS feed from here so that it will work very similarly. Finally I can drop in stuff from my Flickr account very easily as well.
Hopefully this will make this site a better, more integrated way, for me to share what is happening in my life with those it is so difficult for me to stay in touch with. It’s an experiment, and we shall all learn together (I find that amusing as I doubt anyone besides myself has read this far!).
