I guess I should have expected it. Everything technological eventually breaks down… crashes… fails… It just happened to be my time, is all, and I learned my lesson — the hard way.
Earlier this month I had rejoiced in the ease of use this little web logging software. Posting thoughts as they came, a sort of world-wide stream of consciousness pouring from people just like me. I looked hopefully upon the world, marveling on it’s many facetted voices and their billions of ideas. It felt like a revolution. Nobody to tell us what to say. No corporate sponsors.
*An utopian ideal.*
Then the people who host my site had a bit of a problem. It seems that a piece of data had turned to the _dark side_ and decided to take some other data with it and suddenly no more web log. It wasn’t my service provider’s fault, things like this happen all the time, but Funtime Ben never realized that with his account there had been a back-up button which he should have pressed a long time before.
*I lost some posts.*
Any post I publish, out into this soup of electronic information, I expect to have forever. Much like a trusty journal I expected it to be there…. I didn’t expect it to run off with the first disk error it came across. The experience shook me a little.
As such I will be starting over. reinventing the site again with another slant. Much like a near death experience changes people, maybe this near erasure experience should lead to something bigger. It’s not going to be overnight, but maybe one day you might come by and see something completely different… or maybe this is just Monday talk and by Thursday I will have the same feeling about everything.
In short, I urge you if you value your writing and also expect to have it forever, back it up. Download your thoughts to disk and don’t trust the little computer fairies to back it up for you.