An Unexpected Return from the Dead

At about 2am on the 19th of December 2016, something woke up. An old, angry, tired beast who hadn’t been working ever since the 12th of August of that year. This beast was pronounced dead on August 28th, and, after a brief mourning period, was forgotten by everyone but me. I’d regularly go to the beast’s final resting place, hoping that maybe it would wake up or something, but eventually, even I gave up.

I’m talking about the old website for the Daily SPUF, blog.spuf.info. Sometime back in August, when I attempted to create a backup for the website, something went into overdrive, something cracked, something broke. The site was suddenly overloaded at the idea of creating a backup of a 2GB website and put itself to sleep, leaving nothing but a Cloudflare page.

Not sure what I should do, I decided to play the waiting game. I’d scheduled a ton of articles in advance for the upcoming weeks. Even if no one saw them, I could still say that we’d stuck to our one-article-a-day promise. In the mean time, I decided to try and look for a solution, but since I couldn’t actually access any part of the Daily SPUF, there was nothing I could do. I tried contacting thesupremecommander, the host and administrator of the Daily SPUF, but he was always busy and never responded to any of my PMs, messages or emails.

On the 15th of August, knowing I only had three articles left, I gave up completely and rebuilt the Daily SPUF from scratch. Luckily, I’d created a backup of the site a week before the horrible crash, and I managed to salvage almost everything, apart from users and a handful of images. It took me a week to get everything sorted out. I hoped that the new Daily SPUF would be temporary, but as the 28th loomed, I realised I was wrong.

In the end, I decided to cut my loses and keep SPUF.org as the permanent new version of the Daily SPUF, complete with several small, extra features, like the theme-changer to make reading easier at night.

Of course, I loved the old blog.spuf.info, and it had stolen a LOT of our SEO, causing a massive hit in our daily views. I wanted to fix the site, but every time I went to the accursed URL, I was met with the same old Cloudflare error. Like everyone else, I eventually gave up. My daily checks turned into weekly checks, and then into “whenever I feel like it” checks, before finally turning into “whenever I remember” checks.

So you can imagine my surprise when I popped onto Facebook this morning and found a post published by the WordPress Publicizer plugin that had originated not from SPUF.org, but from blog.spuf.info. I clicked the link and was amazed to see that it took me straight to the last article published on the old site – Playing with other People. I checked the Daily SPUF’s facebook page and found fourteen links, all going back to the Daily SPUF’s old site.

Thing is, it’s a bit too late to go back now. I’ve moved everything here, and going back would mean moving a load of stuff. I don’t to do that.

Instead, everything on blog.spuf.info has been archived, and no new blog posts have been there. The site, apart from the home page, now redirects to SPUF.org. There’s also a nice popup that informs new visitors that they’ve stumbled across the old site and that they should head to the new site.

As to what I’ll do with blog.spuf.info in the future, I don’t know right now. Perhaps our readers have some suggestions?