JonDMiller
Publisher/Founder
Thanks to Stormin for helping to repopulate some of the stories and previews he had done for hoops...I reposted several football related stories from the last six weeks, including the Best and Worst Series, the Orange Bowl Notes, Quotes, Anecdotes and other things.
In the grand scheme of things, the lost content items are not horrible, but there are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspects that will have long term effects. We have really been moving up the google search rankings for key terms, and there is a reason for that. Brian Kaldenberg has built a really great site with that being an emphasis.
Now, when people run searches, they are going to dead head on a lot of links, plus the message board posts were also set up to take advantage of googles algorithms.
So that's a start over point for the most part, and it's disappointing to say the least.
We will reinstall several of the modifications we had on the site, such as the avatars, the SEO aspects of forum links, the ability to paste links into a post and have the text of the story show up as the link text automatically, recently added forums, and several other aspects to the site, by week's end or early next week.
Things should seem somewhat back to normal now, and I thank each and every one of you for jumping right back in and starting several conversations on the message boards...plus thanks for the sentiments expressed on the boards, PM's and emails. It really helped pull me out of the very foul mood I was in this morning. No one died and I won't be sleeping out in the cold.
That being said, 'The Incident' was entirely avoidable on several levels, the least of which is not formatting a server that wasn't intended to be formatted.
Apparently 'The Incident' has created an entirely new protocol at the server company, so that something like it never happens again. That's little consolation for us ;-)
Thanks again for supporting this site. It means a lot to me and my family. One of the great things about being out on your own is that you call the shots, you are solely accountable for what you do, good or bad, and you typically reap what you sew. The downside are some things like this...which was really an uncommon thing, something that flabbergasted the host company...and there was something we could have done to have prevented a six week loss of info...there was nothing we could have done to have prevented the server from being wiped out, however. In the end, I prefer being independent and actually owning something, which was not the case for all but five months of my online career before making the move away from Scout back in October. The benefits down the road are worth the growing pains, and the voracious appetite for all things Hawkeye from the fans is the reason for that. So thanks again.
I always say, you don't learn any lessons in life that either don't cost you money or pain or both. This was one of those days.
Thanks to Patrick Webb, Lars and Nathan on the wrestling board, Stormin, Paul, Clem and Graham for the photography help and each of you for visiting the site. 2010 is going to be a lot of fun, and this site is going to introduce some concepts and a content vision that don't presently exist online today...it's going to be a fun ride.
In the grand scheme of things, the lost content items are not horrible, but there are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspects that will have long term effects. We have really been moving up the google search rankings for key terms, and there is a reason for that. Brian Kaldenberg has built a really great site with that being an emphasis.
Now, when people run searches, they are going to dead head on a lot of links, plus the message board posts were also set up to take advantage of googles algorithms.
So that's a start over point for the most part, and it's disappointing to say the least.
We will reinstall several of the modifications we had on the site, such as the avatars, the SEO aspects of forum links, the ability to paste links into a post and have the text of the story show up as the link text automatically, recently added forums, and several other aspects to the site, by week's end or early next week.
Things should seem somewhat back to normal now, and I thank each and every one of you for jumping right back in and starting several conversations on the message boards...plus thanks for the sentiments expressed on the boards, PM's and emails. It really helped pull me out of the very foul mood I was in this morning. No one died and I won't be sleeping out in the cold.
That being said, 'The Incident' was entirely avoidable on several levels, the least of which is not formatting a server that wasn't intended to be formatted.
Apparently 'The Incident' has created an entirely new protocol at the server company, so that something like it never happens again. That's little consolation for us ;-)
Thanks again for supporting this site. It means a lot to me and my family. One of the great things about being out on your own is that you call the shots, you are solely accountable for what you do, good or bad, and you typically reap what you sew. The downside are some things like this...which was really an uncommon thing, something that flabbergasted the host company...and there was something we could have done to have prevented a six week loss of info...there was nothing we could have done to have prevented the server from being wiped out, however. In the end, I prefer being independent and actually owning something, which was not the case for all but five months of my online career before making the move away from Scout back in October. The benefits down the road are worth the growing pains, and the voracious appetite for all things Hawkeye from the fans is the reason for that. So thanks again.
I always say, you don't learn any lessons in life that either don't cost you money or pain or both. This was one of those days.
Thanks to Patrick Webb, Lars and Nathan on the wrestling board, Stormin, Paul, Clem and Graham for the photography help and each of you for visiting the site. 2010 is going to be a lot of fun, and this site is going to introduce some concepts and a content vision that don't presently exist online today...it's going to be a fun ride.
