“To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.” -Henry Hewes

A while back I stopped supporting this site. A lot of things took over my life, and, frankly, I purposely neglected it. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, why would I need to keep up on my own site anyway? Why deal with all that work and custom code? And to top it all off, I never wanted to market it, so no one really visited. The result: into the dark, dank corner of the internet it slipped. And was forgotten.

Until one day, about a month ago, I wanted to get some data off the site. I literally hadn’t visited it in over a year. And, lo and behold, the site was down. Glitch? No problem, I’ll fix it. So, I logged into the admin console at the hosting company and to my horror I found the site was gone. Just. Gone. No files, no nuthin’.

I contacted customer support and asked them to restore the site from backup. After going around with them for a couple of days, they finally came back and told me the credit card I was using to auto-pay for the site was declined seven months ago (my card expired and I never updated my account info). On top of that, I shut down my Exchange server in early 2009, so I wasn’t getting email sent to those domains, which I thought was fine. Guess where the hosting company had sent the payment error emails?

So, they only kept three months of backups of the site. They cancelled my account due to payment failure. So, chewbode.com and all it’s lovely contents and hard work went bye-bye.

I was irritated for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, I realized that the reason that I was irritated wasn’t because of the hosting company’s lack of backups, but that I let all that history
(four years of blog entries, photos, stories, etc.) slip from my grasp. I missed my data. I missed the site – the site I had decided I didn’t need in my life a year prior.

Proof was in the pudding, as they say. It was time to start rebuilding the site. As of now, there is simply this blog. Nothing more. But I will continue to build the site and will make it better than the old one.

To be continued…