This Lamp is BACK (for the love of Margaret...)
06/20/2008 09:24 Filed in: Personal
In case you’re just tuning in, we’ve (yes, that’s a royal plural) been down since late February. I create this website in a program called RapidWeaver and a few months ago, the main file for the site got corrupted. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was a RapidWeaver problem or a me problem. Whatever it was, everytime I loaded the file, all of my blog entries immediately deleted themselves. What that meant is that if I were to publish with that file, all of my blog entries on the internet would have disappeared.
Of course, I know you’re saying, “But didn’t you have a backup?” Well, normally I would have. But in a freak convergence of events, I was switching over to the new Time Machine method for backup. In order to do that, I had to erase the backup on my external hard drive that had been created with my previous backup software. I erased that backup BEFORE I realized that the RapidWeaver file for This Lamp was hosed. That was a bad day... a really bad day.
That left me with my only other backup which was dated from last October. My task over these past few weeks has been to re-create all blog posts from October 2007 through February 2008 based on what was published on the web. It wasn’t as easy as a simple cut and paste. All links had to be re-created as well as a lot of formatting including any text that was in italics. It really shouldn’t have taken more than three weeks or so working on it in my spare time, but I had a couple of other projects that came along that were paying projects, so well...
When This Lamp went into cardiac arrest at the end of February, it had hit a peak of roughly 700 hits a day according to Sitemeter. The interesting thing is that even in its hiatus, the website has still managed to maintain over half that amount of traffic. I think the average blogger would love to have between 350 and 400 hits a day, so it’s not too shabby, and hopefully readers will come back.
Normally, I have a number of upcoming blog posts in the works started within RapidWeaver. All those posts that would have come your way in early March were lost including a review I had been working on for a while on the NET Bible. Of those lost projects, the NET Bible review is the only one I will begin again. Look for it in July, and my apologies to those who have been waiting a year or so. The other lost posts will just stay lost as their time of relevance has past.
Sometime next week, I will launch a second blog-based website that has really nothing to do with most of the normal stuff discussed on This Lamp. This Lamp isn’t going away, nor is it going to be neglected, but rather, I am creating a second site with a different focus which will attract a whole new and different group of readers (I do have wide and varied interests, you know). Look for that announcement next week. I don’t know how many of you regular readers will be interested, but you’re welcome to join us there, too (and no, that time I was NOT using a royal plural).
My thanks and appreciation to all of you who sent regular emails asking about my progress restoring This Lamp and encouraging me in the process. I really didn’t enjoy the tedium of rebuilding the site, and never once did I consider abandoning it, but it was your encouragement that kept me pushing forward.
One more very important thing. In the reconstruction, for whatever reason, the HaloScan comments are completely messed up. I have no doubt that as soon as I publish this post, comments from what should go with a previous post will be attached to this one. I have no real way of ever fixing this, BUT it should work itself out in a few days as I add new content to This Lamp. In other words, eventually moving forward, new posts will be matched to the right comments. In fact, if you post here, your comments will remain, but will follow comments that were originally intended for an earlier post.
Well, it’s good to be back. I look forward to our upcoming discussions.