Return of not-MrSharkey.com

So yeah, it's been a long time gone.

On March 1, 2013, an IT administrator conducting an audit on the network of a large corporate broadcast owner's system discovered my little hobby site existing as a zombie on a discarded server sitting buried in a rack in a radio station that I once worked in. His response was to shut down the IP address on the network to the server, effectively killing my site. He wasn't very gracious about the situation, and wouldn't turn it back on even for a short time so I could get a backup of the database. I knew I had been running on borrowed time, riding on the coattails of this corporate giant. Shutting off the connection was their method of shaking me off.

Within a day or two, I held a private "wake" for my domain, played a few pieces of appropriate music, burned a candle and some incense, and pretty much made up my mind that it was the end of MrSharkey.com, in spite of my having just renewed the domain name for five more years.

Because I was existing in the cloister of a disregarded server that had not been maintained for some years, my site would be very difficult to migrate to a "modern" server running current versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc. It was one of the reasons that I hadn't moved the site previously, like a worn, old, comfortable chair, the site ran fine on the old software, and I just left it alone. Moving to a new server would mean upgrading my CMS (Content Management System), which was several versions out-of-date, and for which no import path existed. I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm required to make it functional again, in spite of several well-intentioned offers of new server space from friends.

Five years passes like nothing, and I didn't miss the site that much. Archive.org has some pretty decent snapshots of the site before it went boom, and I was feeling like much of the content on the site was stale anyway, so I left it down.

OK, so I got a little bored this week, I created a virtual user account on a server where I manage another web site, and uploaded the old CMS software. Getting a copy of the database installed was a bit of work, I had a backup from about ten days before the site went dark, so the material was mostly there. I had to upload the database in increments, as the new server had size limits, but I got the important parts installed.

There is still an overwhelming amount of work to be done. Because I'm using a virtual user account, very few of the in-site address links were any longer correct. I'm having to open and edit every page on the site, sometime several times and edit the addresses to point to the correct location. There are loads and loads of images to upload, and I have what I consider the world's worst internet connection, but I do a few each day.

Maybe sooner or later this thing will be back up and running. Maybe not...

If so, I have five years and eight months of catching up to do.