so this is what happened – my web host was moving stuff from one set of servers to another, and I got a notice a couple of weeks back that this was going to happen. however, I procrastinated, and then forgot, and then one day my site was just, well, gone. had to change the DNS entry, which meant finding my domain host account info, and then discovering that – oh crap – my domain name had actually expired, and I hadn’t known because they had an email address that I’d since thrown to the wolves. so, renewed, changed DNS, now looking through my backups such as they are to see what I’ll be able to do.
– design is no big deal; yay for PHP and templates.
– this blog also no problem; oddly, yay for centralized services
– static pages I change so rarely, and had updated when I last changed my template, so again, nothing to worry about
– Movable Type blogs (Snapping Links and Media Diet), on the other hand….I don’t remember if I actually exported when I last backed up, or just saved the files. I’m also not too sure about when I last did that, or if you can reimport the HTML, etc. eventually they’ll return, probably with a few items missing. most irritating to me is being absolutely certain that Ralph’s really neat comment about Robert Wright is gone. 🙁 That, and a huge linkfest that I never actually published.
what I should do, this time, is create a good 404 page, because after the last couple of years of moving hosts, redesigning, trashing, etc., I’m sure there are lots of past URLs that are no more.