Holy shit! I see the error that’s been deleting or truncating comments in the talkbacks here has been doing to the same thing to my regular posts – all the way back to the beginning. This is looking to be a major disaster.
UPDATE: The farther I look, the worse it gets. It looks like the majority of my posts over the past four years have been destroyed, perhaps irretrievably.
2ND UPDATE: The Empire is currently undergoing reconstruction and, apart from a few comments being lost and apparently others having their order rearranged, looks like it’s well on its way to a 99% recovery. Thanks, Brandon!
Shit, I had just posted about my fear of that happening. Are there any backups at all? Maybe your hosting provider takes routine backups. Sometimes, even if you haven’t signed up for any additional backup service, they will maintain backups and charge you to retrieve them. It’s probably worth looking into. Worst case, I think I have a few posts saved, and I’m sure others do too. Let me know if I can be of any help.
Oh goddess! I am so, so, deeply sorry to hear this. I’d noticed the site was wonky, but I had no idea.
There are few writers online I’d less like this to happen to. You are- no flattery attempted or implied- one of the best philosophic writers I’m aware of on the web. You see things a day or two before I do, and that’s on an ethereally good day.
Wayback machine? Is there anything that can be done?
A friend of mine just had a similar disaster, and we’ve found that Google Reader is your friend. As long as there was an RSS or Atom feed for your blog, it will keep the blog entries around indefinitely. (In fact, there’s some controversy over the service, because even posts deliberately deleted or edited by the authors are a matter of public record for all eternity.)
FWIW, Google’s cache still has what appears to be the full text of “Pale Nerd, Pale Rider”. Do you have raw access to what’s behind WordPress (presumably a MySQL database)?
I do have a recent backup, and if all goes according to plan, I’ll have everything back to normal, with the possible exception of a few comments, today sometime.
If you run a WordPress site, do NOT use the utf-8 database converter plugin with WP 2.8 until the plugin is upgraded.
Roderick, what about the Internet Archive AKA the Wayback Machine?
Your current blog address doesn’t register, but it takes at least 6 months to get in…what was your old blog website URL ?
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Care if it falls?
Well, yes, actually.
I think I can access every post since Dec. 23rd, 2008, and probably a few more from before then. I really hope your host or someone has a full backup though.
Thank you.