BKN Site Data Lost

If you’ve visited BlaineKyle.Net in the last year or so, you’ll have noticed that there’s not much here.

I accidentally let my hosting subscription lapse, and GoDaddy wanted hundreds of dollars to restore the data. Given this is a small personal website with little traffic and minimal utility, the cost was not justifiable.

I’m not fully blaming GoDaddy for this, but I will say they deserve some credit for wiping out my old website with content going back to the ’90s, when I first taught myself basic HTML in elementary school.

See, I lost my hosting, along with all my data, because the card on file was expired. But, I didn’t lose any of my domains, which renew at different times throughout the year. Why is that? Well, because apparently GoDaddy keeps separate payment profiles for each product on a customer’s account. So, when my old credit card expired in 2018, I updated it after receiving a notification from GoDaddy that my domains could not be automatically renewed due to this fact. This did not update the card on file for my hosting account, however, and when it lapsed, they pulled my data. They still have it, evidently, but, to paraphrase Blagojevich, they’ve got this thing and it’s fricking golden, and, uh, they’re just not giving it up for feckin’ nothing. So they’re holding it hostage, but the ransom is higher than I can reasonably pay.

I did get a few emails about this from GoDaddy. I don’t really doubt that I overlooked these emails, frankly, because they email me approximately 14 times for every domain renewal, even when they are set to auto-renew and no action is needed by me. It’s like that story kids tell each other about the guy named Bloody Fingers who calls your hose from across town, then down the block, then two houses over, then next door, then when he’s at your door. Or maybe that’s not universal; it could just be a story my cousin made up. I never understood how he called from the front door, but maybe the story was always set in the future and he’s just using a cell phone. This is obviously super important and fully warranted a divergence from the topic at hand. Hit the comments if you have any idea what the hell I’m even talking about.

So, I’ve still got the domain, I set up a new hosting account, and I’ve thrown up a basic WordPress installation to start from. I can pull a lot of my old data manually from Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, although it isn’t all there, and has to manually copied over. The really old stuff may still be at LiveJournal, where I hosted my site many ages ago, and from which I originally imported using a program called Blog2Blog. So I may investigate the viability of that option again, but it was very long ago, and that software, if it can even be found, may be difficult to use on a modern OS (although if I really want to do it, I could always set up a virtual machine with a legacy OS to do his, assuming it’s still compatible with the modern incarnations of the relevant APIs, which is probably unlikely).

But hey, this website really needed an overhaul anyway. I’m trying to look at it that way. I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it yet, but my current plan is to re-work it to reflect my current creative priorities of screenwriting, general writing, and tinkering / tech support. Maybe I’ll try to pull over my old comics. I don’t think they’re very good, but I’ve got some friends that really enjoyed them.

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