Ugly In So Many Ways

Yes Leoville is looking pretty awful. I'm reconstructing it from scratch. Fortunately, as you can see, all the posts survived the apocalyptic demise of my server's RAID 5 Array. Unfortunately, none of the Wordpress customizations did. So I'm downloading the plug-ins, restoring the template, hacking the CSS, and desperately trying to remember the changes I made. All the comments are safe with Disqus and will return when I turn on the Disqus plug-in. (Done. Thanks, Disqus!) Unfortunately, the image directory was not saved. That means all the attached images will be blank. I will be able to recreate some of them from my local archives, but most are lost forever. -sigh- All of this is because I was too cheap to buy the many gigabytes of storage required to backup that data. It was a false economy. I've purchased 200GB of storage from my host, Softlayer, at the extortionate rate of $180/month. (That's twice what a hard drive of that size would cost outright - 2400% more per year - and I thought the cell phone companies were bad.) And I'll be setting up rsync and S3 for a secondary backup, as well. Meanwhile it's back to the depressing and very time consuming work of fixing this place up again. Now I know, in a very small way, how it must feel to survive a hurricane.