Rubenerd

"A phoenix rising from its ashes"

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Yes, you're reading that correctly, according to this WordPress installation this is technically the first post!

On Wednesday my now-old webhost's database was compromised, resulting in ALL FIVE YEARS WORTH OF BLOG POSTS BEING WIPED! Because of the other problems I've had with Servage's lax security over these last few months I decided enough was enough and I instead restored my backups to my account with Segment Publishing.

I took the opportunity to also move back to my original domain which I registered back when I first started this blog when I was in early high school: //rubenerd.com/. If you don't believe me, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has some history on this domain. Brings back lots of happy memories, and in a silly emotional way it feels like I'm back home again. Back when I created that site my mum was still alive and my life had direction and meaning which I only just recently claimed back. But that's an entirely different topic.

I've set up .htaccess 301 redirects on the old URI so every blog post should be accessible from it's old address. This is the first time I've done this, and I'm not sure what effect it will have on people reading this in Google Reader. I hope you don't get pummelled with posts you've already read, if you do I apologise!

And now the bad news

Unfortunately for reasons I won't bore you with now my most recent backups were corrupted, meaning only posts dating from September 2004 to Feburary 2009 made it. I was able to download the rest from Google's cache (VERY cool!), now it's just a matter of writing a Perl script to extract the data and comments from those static HTML pages and dump them here.

This means posts I wrote from February 17th till now are unavailable, but I hope to have them back by tomorrow or Saturday. The site is also using the same crappy theme I hacked together back in 2006, but that's the next step. I'm working on getting those other posts back first!

The end is the best place for an ending

Thank you to everyone on Twitter and Google Reader for your encouraging words, this has definitely been a learning experience. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes I think this site will be better than it was before after this transition is done. Lots of scaffolding, incomplete walls and new paint smell going around, and my overalls are dirty as muck. That was for you Atuuschaaw :).

Peace, love and happiness,
Ruben