Apple II Adventures Fell in a Hole with Grues, is Now Back

So it’s been a long time since I updated, but even worse, this entire site has been down for almost three weeks. This is because of the implosion of its host, Nexpoint, which had been a reasonably dependable host for my sites for almost 10 years, but which this year changed to new and apparently calamitous management. Other people experienced serious problems with Nexpoint-hosted sites earlier this year, as evidenced on this webhost talk thread, but the rot didn’t spread to me til early this month, when nexpoint’s own site disappeared completely, and everyone’s hosted sites went dark. You can read what all of us Nexpoint-hosted folk went through on that thread.

We also discovered that if you had registered our domain with nexpoint, nexpoint had listed their info as the owner, and one of their tech people’s email address as the contact point. This meant it was impossible to transfer a domain you owned, because a confirmation email needed to be sent to and replied from the email address listed as the domain’s contact point. So our domains were basically held hostage while nexpoint maintained radio silence. I was finally able to get someone at nexpoint to change the contact info to mine, and thus was able to transfer the domain to my new host, Inmotion. But the server hosting all my site files is still not back on-line, 3 weeks in.

I did have my own recent backups of the site html, wordpress themes, etc for all my sites. Unfortunately, my backup exports of the wordpress databases were much older, ending mid 2009. Thank goodness Feedburner had a cache of the RSS feed, so I was able to manually re-add the missing posts one-by-one from the HTML feed. But all comments post mid-2009 are gone, which is a big bummer. :/

Anyway, the disaster is now over, please re-subscribe if I got kicked off for server not found messages, etc., and know I will be much more scrupulous with wordpress database backups from now on!

In Apple II-specific news, I definitely gave up on Star Saga, it was too taxing to play it solo the “real” way, switching between physical map, books and computer constantly – I’ll use the PC Game Kit (map + booklet entries) program when I try its massive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure narrative again.  In programming news, I’ve been happily messing around with Macrosoft, essentially a large collections of macros for Mindcraft’s Assembler that allows you to write assembly programs with almost BASIC-like ease, as well as investigating Beagle Graphics (again), Cat Graphics and St. John Morrison’s Saturday Morning Animation System for game engine integration.  I’ll share details on that stuff soon.