Back From the (Temporary) Dead

We interrupt the not-so-regularly scheduled blog postings to bring you a site update:

It’s been a pretty terrible technology month for me. My beloved first-generation iPhone died while I was at a conference in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Then last week, my server at TopClassHost suffered a major hardware failure, essentially killing News-Geek.com. The long and the short of it is that a drive containing all of my site information died and, while downloading all the data, the backup drive died, too.

I can’t say that this site is my life. My husband is my life. My family and friends are my life. Nonetheless, this site contains a huge chunk of my existence. It illustrates my skills and accomplishments, and it serves as a living archive of what I’ve done and an indicator of what I am capable of. It is not melodramatic to say that News-Geek.com is truly a part of who I am.

Last Thursday started off nicely. I posted a pretty fun piece on GEEKWARE, which my friends and readers seemed to enjoy.

I noticed the outage a couple of hours later, but only began to worry that evening. Down time is nothing new; every site experiences it sometimes. But my site had never disappeared for more than an hour at a time since I launched it five years ago.

That night, I sent out a couple of concerned e-mails and received confirmation that my data was gone. I felt like I’d gotten the wind knocked out of me. Fortunately for me, however, I’m not a moper. In fact, I feel like I went through the five stages of grief in two hours and one night’s sleep. As they say, “A house pulled down is half rebuilt.” By Friday morning, I was ready to rebuild this house of my works. And that’s what I’m doing now.

As you can see, I’ve restored my posts, pages, widgets, and layout. There are a few files that I’m still trying to track down, but the site is mostly back to it’s old self.

“A house pulled down is half rebuilt.”