Hurray! We are back! Almost ten days after the site crashed, we are finally back live again! Thank you all so much for your patience during this incredibly frustrating time.

For those interested in the nitty gritty (if not, skip to the next paragraph)… I back up my site nightly with a backup plug in that also saves a copy on the server. Unfortunately, the backup process crashed my server, which meant that my site host could not repair or restore the backup from the version they had. They tried over the course of several days to then restore from backups I had saved on my end, also unsuccessfully. Things weren’t helped by the fact that their support team is now working remotely due to Covid-19 concerns, so things were slowed way down and every attempt too 24-36 hours. In the process of all this, they restored an old version of the site (which is why we had the 2018 copy for a few days), which then crashed because it was using such outdated version of WordPress, etc. So they then tried to give me a blank new site and let me try to restore from backup on my end. That also failed. Finally, like a goddess from above, I found a developer (with the help of the fabulous Reese Dante) who was able to work some magic and spent a million hours over the last day getting it all fixed. Thank you to Frauke from CrocoDesigns for her amazing work (also you can check her site out here).

Ok, so we are back up and running… mostly. For some reason, we were not able to recover anything from March 21-26. But compared to losing almost 10 years worth of content, I can live with it! I am currently running through a host of little odds and ends to fine tune some things that got a bit roughed up on the transition. If you notice anything acting funky, please let me know, as I may have missed something somewhere. So, as you can imagine, getting us all back on line and sorted again is going to take some time. Here is a lot of news about what to expect:

New Posts: I will be starting business as usual tomorrow and going forward. That means expect to see our Coming This Week post Sunday and the slate of new content coming on Monday. We keep a daily calendar at least 2-3 weeks out, so I already know what is scheduled to run going forward. I think keeping to our schedule as much as possible will make the gearing back up process smoother, as well as letting us get new reviews up closer to the book’s release date.

Posts Between 3/26-4/3: Anything that was supposed to run while we were down will still run. This includes guest post and reviews. I will not be running this back content all at once because honestly, no one can absorb a dump of 25 new posts at once. So I will be spreading those out over the next week or two. Authors who had guest posts set to run, I will be contacting you with the revised schedule of when your new post will go live (either directly or through whomever booked your spot). I apologize for any inconvenience this caused.

Posts That Disappeared from 3/20-2/26: I am going to do my best to get these back live. For many of them, I still have the original review content and I can resubmit it to post. However, this is going to be a lot of manual work as the posts need to be edited, formatted, etc and so this is going to happen last. But I will do my best to get as many of these missing items posted as humanly possible. We are going to attempt to recreate giveaways comments, etc to as great a degree as possible, but this may just fall into the “situation beyond our control” category in terms of counting entries that may have gone missing. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Ads: If you had an ad in March, you should have received an email from me with various options for getting reimbursed for days we were down. For my April folks, ads will go live tomorrow (or as soon as I get the art from you). Invoices are in your email.

Spoilers: So apparently my spoiler plug in (the one that makes the pretty little “show/hide” options for spoiler text) blew up in the site crash. My developer said it is too old to try to get it to work again on the site. I am going to get a new one, but be aware that old posts that used that spoiler tag probably won’t have it working anymore. I am sorry about that. We take spoilers very seriously and try to avoid them (hence the tag), but unfortunately, there is no way to go back and track down what posts might have used the old plug in and fix them now. Sorry about that.

OK, I think that is everything. Thank you all so much for you patience during this rocky time. I appreciate all the support and understanding you guys have shown. You are all the best!

 

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