From the somewhat addled mind of Gordon Skene:
You have options – and both of them are just below the photo. As you know, we were hot in the midst of our Annual Past Daily Fundraiser almost two weeks ago – doing our yearly stump for support in order to keep the site up and going for the rest of the year. And just when things were moving along at a reasonable clip; disaster struck. Through a series of foulups and glitches, the server we are on decided to up and crash, taking everything with it. Some 7,000 posts (so far) and untold hours of work and writing, vanished within seconds. And even though our hosts were loath to admit it, we were in big-big trouble. This was the equivalent of having your neighborhood catch on fire and your house burning down when you weren’t looking. It was a disaster and it was time to stop pointing fingers of blame, and to figure out what the options were. One was to start all over again – the other was to stop and walk away – the third was to look for a plausible solution and, if that solution worked, make sure it didn’t happen again.
After hours and days of going through hard-drives and getting a goodly amount of runaround by well-meaning, but somewhat annoyed techs, it was discovered a back-up for the entire site existed, and it was just a matter of feeding those 7,000+ posts back on to the server and hoping for the best.
So after a few days of the slow and painstaking process, things were back up – but they weren’t quite running. Seems I got hit by the perfect storm while the house was burning down. In the midst of doing the restoration, WordPress decided it was a good time to upgrade their operating platform – but many elements that were an integral part of Past Daily became suddenly incompatible. The posts were back, but they all looked like they had huffed glue and graphics were askew, copy was displaced and audio was wonky. On the verge of letting out a sigh of relief, it was replaced by a gasp of doom.
Back to more hours of hunting, checking and head-scratching. In the midst of it, readers and listeners were writing in, sending e-mails and texts, asking what was going on and if I was okay, or was I broken into and being held hostage by a gang of Ukrainians who wanted millions in bitcoin for their troubles in exchange for my peace of mind (what was left of it). We were busy looking for culprits – and true to cliffhanger fashion, the culprit was found – lurking in the Plugins folder was the one element that toss the proverbial wrench into the mix – a plugin that seemed innocuous, but which held all the fragile pieces of the site together in order to make it look presentable. One deft stroke of the deactivation switch and a quick deposit in the trash and the site was back up – looking bright and clean and loaded with history.
So now we’re back up and running – playing catch-up with what we missed and what we had truly-truly lost (not much, it turns out). But it also put us in a bad financial spot and it also caused us to stop our Fundraiser in mid-stream.
So . . . .we’re back and we’re appealing – now it’s to pay for getting us back up and running in addition to keeping us going. Since the advent of Crowdfunding, the field of appeals is getting more and more crowded – disasters, both public and private, have been flooding social media in recent months. Asking for money is getting tougher to do, but what Past Daily is doing is offering a service for the long-haul. Offering history and news and Popular Culture in a way you don’t get anyplace else. In fact, I have it on high-spirited authority that many of the news and social media outlets with much bigger budgets and many more faces visiting have used and are using posts coming from Past Daily for their own. Good on them – that’s what we’re here for – spreading news and history to everyone. But, it would be nice for one or two of those corporate entities to toss in a few bucks now and then, just to make sure the flow continues.
And that’s why I’m asking you to help by chipping what you can – either by PayPal in one lump, or via Patreon, which is spread out over a year. You can kick in a dollar on Patreon and it will not only be painless, it will be the gift that keeps on giving. So for as little as $12.00 a year you can keep us up and running, posting 3-5 times a day, giving you all the stuff from our Archive – that massive collection of sound recordings going back to 1898 which you get to hear every day you visit.
I’m asking for your help and your contributions – not asking for a lot – but if enough of you chip in even a little, it will make all the difference in the world.
So please take a second or two to consider it and make your choice to contribute to help keep Past Daily up and running. If you’ve read this far you don’t have to scroll back to the top for the PayPal or Patreon buttons – they are right below. But do what you can – tell your friends – cross post to your social media pages and help spread the word. Past Daily is getting bigger every day as more of you make the discovery and like what you’ve found. There’s a lot – there is more every day. And thanks to those of you who have chipped in so far, you can’t know just how much you have saved the day during this disaster.
Big hug to you all,
Gordon Skene
Here are the buttons:
