A few days ago (today being Nov. 10, 2009 as I'm writing this), I got an unpleasant surprise. Logging into my email, which I had been away from for a while, I saw a message from Webring stating that this site had been suspended from one of the rings it had joined, because the code was missing. How could this be, I wondered, because I had never removed the code.

Following the links from one of my groups, I soon found the answer - the code was missing, because the site was missing, replaced by a message indicating that it had been deleted for spam activity. This was absolutely untrue. I had never engaged in anything that could even remotely be called spamming. I hadn't so much as sent even a single invitation to join, relying on the "build it and they will come" school of group building. Say what you will about the effectiveness of such an approach - it does leave me as pure as the driven snow in terms of complaints such as these.

I could offer a guess as to what happened, but when one's provider does as Angelcities did, and doesn't respond to one's queries, guesses are fruitless at best, and possibly quite harmful. They did eventually take down the notice, however, and today, I found that I was able to recreate my site, sort of. I could re-register the account, but the material was gone from Angelcities' servers. I still have copies of most of it on my own harddisk, but tracking it all down will take time, because some of it was here, some of it was there ... most annoying, and most atypical. I'm usually better prepared for the worst than this, putting all of the pages for one of my sites in a single directory and subdirectories with that directory in a way that parallels the file structure of the site so backed up, so I'll know where everything is, should I have to recreate my site, but this time, I seem to have neglected to do that. Worse still, the site doesn't seem to have made it into the Internet Archive, yet, hampering reconstruction efforts.

Oops. I'll be more careful, this time, but for now, if you find yourself with broken links or bookmarks to nowhere, sorry about that, but this really was a surprise. Drop by, tell me what was missing, and I'll try to attend to that as soon as possible - and then thank you for your input, because such requests tell me which filenames I should be searching for, on a hard disk that has a lot of stuff on it. Also, given how quick Angelcities was on the draw - they didn't even contact me about the complaint(s) - while I'm prepared to give them another chance, I'm also going to mirror this homepage elsewhere online, and not just on my disk. Right now, the site is all my creation, but as time goes on, and these groups grow, it would presumably become more of a group effort, and I would like any prospective contributor to know that I make a good faith effort to ensure that his content will stay in public view.

I don't know if that's good enough, but for now, it's all I can do. Shall we return to where you were, before?