Quite a few people have written to me over the last couple of days, offering to help re-enter some of the more popular blog entries that were lost from this site earlier last week – I’m really touched that so many people have offered to chip in and help. So … if anyone’s still interested, I’ve pulled together a list of fifty or so of the most popular pages from October and November, and therefore if anyone who’s interested, and

• Is familiar with Wordpress 2.x
• Knows how to recover a page, given a URL, from the Google Cache, and
• Would be able to cut-and-paste the HTML from the cache page into a Wordpress posting box (the images are still on the site), and
• Could do this for five pages

Just drop me a line at mark@rittman.net, or add a comment to this page, and I’ll give you a site login and a list of five URLs. I’ll do it in order of importance, so if only a couple are able to help, at least we’ll get some of the good stuff. If people are busy now, no problem, but if you’ve got 30 minutes spare, it might help get some of the more relevant content back on the site.

Also, if you’ve got RSS feeds of content (all the images are still on the site, I just need the HTML) or any other backups of good, perhaps older stuff, send it through – if it’s HTML, try and strip out any tags added by Word, or again I’ll give you a login and you can give it a try yourself. Let me know what you’re going to upload though, as it might already be allocated to someone else.

Cheers!

Except… it turns out their monthly, weekly and daily backups didn’t include my mySQL databases, as the backup had been misconfigured.

So … that’s all the content of this site lost. Around 700+ postings, all the comments, all the pages, all the links, all gone. Nice one. I’ve managed to recreate the wordpress database and put up this initial posting, but as for all the old content, it looks like it’s gone. As will I be, when I sort out a new hosting provider, but until then, sorry folks, all the old stuff is no more.

UPDATE: It’s all still lost, but I’ve managed to copy a few recent pages from blog aggregators such as biblogs.com. When I get back from the UKOUG, I’ll try and restore a few more, but all the old stuff is still lost, unless any readers have got copies of any old articles they’d like to see restored.

UPDATE 2: Well, if you’re interested in how it happens, here’s the gory details. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions; the internet wayback machine goes back to March this year, which I’ll probably point people to for older content. A couple of people have got archives of recent posts, feeds etc so I’ll be contacting them separately to get hold of their copies. Other than that, thanks for the commisserations/best wishes, and I’ll just have to make up for it by posting a few more good articles soon…