Here is the whole scoop. The server's been gone for a few days and there really hasn't been an explanation, and now the pages aren't quite right, and plus the archives have disappeared, and I'm sure you want to know what happened. Right? I mean if there's anyone reading this after all that is happened.
Some how sometime the server crashed or something. I haven't gotten a good explanation for what happened, but it was fairly clear early on that things were gone and that they weren't coming back; but for some unknown reason our email was still working. Sort of: Mary Beth was having some problems and in retro spec my email was sporadic at best. Finally that gave out too, and so I arranged other hosting and as a result we've moved into much more spacious and equipped digs and I only had backups for the files but not the databases where all of the important things were. I managed to zap some life into this instillation of b2 and everything works as well as it might, sans data. (And for some reason things aren't being pushed off the index page as they should which is part of the reason for this post.)
In any case I remembered that Amy of Domesticat.net offered to let me have a go at her new (and really fab Content Management system). It's a little buggy now, but I'm told that there's already an update on the way, and I really like it, the main problem is that Amy hasn't yet posted (she's making good progress on this one too) the PHP functions necessary for display. Given my knowledge of PHP I could probably write the functions myself, but I'm not really up for that right now so I'm biding my time and currently have b2 and Quarto until the display functions start to work. Thankfully though, Amy's functions will work perfectly for me given that the idea for most of my code features come from things I've seen used on her site. When we switch over in addition to all the things you've grown used to, we're going to try to add a surfing diary/link list as well as a really neat category system.
On a more personal note, Chris (but we call him Andy) has been done with school until next semester for about a week, and I'm free as of this Thursday at 11 o'clock. I'm hoping to get a sizeable chunk done on the book, as well as a few other writing and web project work. It's going to be an interesting break, and I really can't wait for the freedom, again. I just need to get done with this semester. I have two more papers to finish up and then its home free.
More later, I should get back to work; and I'm sure there are tons of typos so just lay off.