Raising the good ship
I got an email on Tuesday from someone I hadn’t heard from in ages, Corco, who I last knew as a frequently-put-into-timeout teen (which, as a frequently put-into-timeout kid myself… lot of sympathy), letting me know that the site was down, and had been for a bit, and could I perhaps help in an archive and restoration effort?
I had thought I’d handed over the domain along with hosting way back on the day, but no! Still in my name, so I hunted down the domain registrar that bought our domain registrar, paid to get the name out of hock, and yeah, the emergency keys still work, thanks to everyone who could have kicked me off and didn’t.
Which, if anyone’s reading this: a huge thanks to everyone who kept USSM up and running into 2023 after I left. I’ll write more about this in a second, but right now I have to back this whole thing up, perform a huge batch of upgrades (wow, did I not miss keeping WordPress secured), and then I do not know what’s after that urgent work. I’ll update this post as I go. This has brought up a lot of feelings.
Thanks to David J Corcoran for reaching out. I promise I’ll lift any remaining commenting bans after I get through this first part.
Update: database backed up, can’t get the files
Update: ugh, can’t upgrade the version. This is bad.
You cannot update because WordPress 7.0 requires PHP version 7.4 or higher. You are running version 7.2.34-54+0~20250311.107+debian11~1.gbpd6988c.
Now I’m worried we’re going to immediately be hijacked and turned into sports betting slop.
Aww…yeah.
Just like the good ol’ days!
Holy crap my login still works!
And my login still works too! (I got a warning that my password may not be secure, but what would a hacker do with a stolen login to USSM, make a post about batting averages and bunting?)
Huzzah! Not that I have any expectations much less requests about what a revived site should do. It’s just cool that it’s not dead yet.
I’m just trying to get this up and stabilized as a historic artifact of when I was a pretty decent baseball writer, and before Dave ascended.
I can’t properly explain how happy I was to see this post in my feed reader. I’d noticed the domain had expired earlier this month and wanted to reach out to ask if it could be renewed (or offer to help restore and properly archive the site), but I also didn’t want to dump extra work into your lap.
This site and all the work on it truly deserves to be archived for the future. I find myself digging through the archives for an old nugget or post all the time. If you need any help with the WordPress side of things, please let me know.
OMG!I just randomly decided to stop by here to see if there was any activity, and here you are! What a pleasure to see a new post, and I hope there will be more! This makes me very happy!