The film website I’ve run for 13 years (Where the Long Tail Ends) got eaten alive by a server crash a couple of weeks ago. Due to all sorts of bad breaks, our data is pretty much gone. Sort of. We can recover it thanks to Archive.ord and The Way Back Machine, but everything will need to be manually input rather than simply uploading a backup.
It’s going to take a long time to get even a fraction of all that back up.
A long time.
The good news about this is I have been putting off doing a site redesign for the past year or so, mainly because it is a bit of an undertaking and I rarely get it to a point where I feel happy about it. Thus begins the inevitable irritability that leads me to eventually changing it again a few years later and repeating the whole dreaded cycle.
Since everything is gone, I can pick and choose what to include in the redesign and make the layout much more seamless and easier to navigate. Hopefully, that makes for a better site for users and for everyone who posts. That’s the goal anyways.
On the bright side, I’ve been putzing around with some new logos for the site, since I have to replace most everything anyways, I might as well spruce up the place, and so far, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I still will do some tweaking, but at least this part of this process is bringing me some joy.
