As of just a few minutes ago, mikel.org is back on the air.
The month-long absence of this site was caused by a very unfortunate problem with the company who I used to use as a virtual host, PlanetESS, based in Toronto. They managed to completely munge the box this site and probably thousands of others were on, and they somehow managed to overwrite their backup in the process. Everything on the server was lost.
Since I only moved over to Movable Type a few months ago I had most of the old content backed up, but I hadn’t done that for the more recent stuff. So I had to re-install MT on a new host (the so far excellent BlackSun), rebuild all the templates from local copies and re-write some that I had put together quickly only on the lost server. Luckily Google came to the rescue – it had cached my whole site and though it required some manual and BBEdit-assisted work, I think I got most, if not all, of the content back and then deployed most of it last night.
Lessons from this experience? No matter how tempting, and how simple it seems, keep a local backup of everything on your server. It’s not always simple to do, but it would have saved me lots of effort.
