And we are back

Folks, I must apologize for the almost three weeks that we have been down. The most frustrating part here was that I couldn’t write a post to explain what happened. Long story short, the site would load fine, as I’m sure you saw, but we could not access the admin panel to create new content. Nothing worked. Naturally, we were all frustrated.

If the site doesn’t load for you, clear cache and try again.

I called my hosting provider who spent a week trying to figure out what the issue was. They eventually told me the site had outgrown its current hosting and database plan and I needed to upgrade. While it most certainly would have been nice to receive some kind of warning before this happened, I needed to upgrade. The upgrade required a whole new server environment and a dedicated Linux/cPanel host. With that comes a full migration. That’s 11 years of blogging, images, comments, etc that need to be moved over. It takes time to move all of it, and it took almost two full weeks.

But here we are. We are back. You’ll notice the layout of the site is a little off, and I made the decision to just get the damn site up again and then do everything else in the background while we produce content for you all. You’re going to see a lot of changes in the coming weeks to the layout. There will also be some changes in the background that you won’t see. Usually I’d want this all done beforehand, but I’m taking a more agile approach to this.

As a way of making this up to you for all the down time, we are going to run a ton of content over the next week or so. If you’ve been here a while, we usually stick to a post per day until the season starts, unless there is news. We have so much backlogged content that we will be doing a post every 3-4 hours for the next week. Some may seem dated, but based on the number of you that reached out to me during the down time, I’m guessing you all missed reading it as much as we all missed writing it.

Thank you to everyone who reached out on social media and via email to check in on the site and on me. I assure you I never had any plans to shut the site down, and it meant a lot that you were all reaching out to ensure I was ok and that the site was not coming down. It means a lot.

One last thing: As you guys know, I launched a Patreon in April after the site was hacked. Now is a good time to bring that up again, as this site does cost a good amount of money to keep afloat, and this has has been particularly expensive to keep it up and running. If you enjoy reading, want to ensure the site stays afloat, and have a few bucks a month to spare, it would be greatly appreciated.