Now that the dust has begun to settle a bit, we probably owe you an explanation of what happened here.

Apparently, there was some sort of large-scale natural disaster that none of us heard about on CNN — a huge fire, a flood, an earthquake, at attack of locusts, frogs raining from the sky, or the arrival of pale horsemen on pale horses. Something like that must have happened, because the company that formerly hosted this site (as well as Hellnotes, Dave’s personal site and many other Web sites that he administers) simply vanished off the face of the earth a few weeks ago. This was a seemingly reputable firm that had never given us a moment’s trouble or cause for concern, so you see, it must have been something of strange and biblical proportions that caused them to disappear overnight, with no notice, no explanation, and no response to our queries.

At first, we didn’t think much of the “service outage.” About six weeks ago, the whole system had gone down for a couple of days, presumably for some technical problem or other. It seemed likely that the same thing was happening again, and we expected everything to be back to normal in a day or two. But then two days stretched to three, then to seven, then to ten, and with no response from the hosting company, it became clear that we’d have to make a move.

Which is precisely what we have done.

Set up with a new host, we then faced the daunting task of rebuilding the site. What should have been just a minor nuisance, a boring busywork sort of task, soon turned into a major headache, when it became clear that neither of us had a complete local backup of what was posted here before.

I know … I know. You can say it. You can call us every name in the book. It’s true. We were idiots. And we’ve learned our lessons, believe me. From this day hence, we will always — always — keep local copies of our Web sites. Did I say always? Because that’s exactly what I meant. Daily backups. Local copies. Always.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. I was eventually able to salvage all the old material in several different ways (one of them quite mysterious, even miraculous), which brings us to where we are today — in rebuilding mode.

As of now, just the biography and FAQ pages have been reposted, but as I said below, the rest will be gradually reappearing over the next week or so. That includes all of the exclusive material and all of the old posts. There’s a fair amount of formatting involved, so it’s relatively time-consuming, but when I start getting frustrated, I remind myself that the problems here are nothing like what Dave is facing at Hellnotes, where hundreds of posts need to be put back up. We’re all thinking of you, Dave, we really are. Now get back to work!

Anyway, that’s our story in a nutshell. There may be more to tell someday, including the fairly inexplicable way I was able to capture some of that old material. But for now, let me just say thanks for your patience and your support. It means a lot, and we appreciate it.