Sorry if you came to Notes From The Nat today and found it was down - we decided to take the site offline for a few hours so we could do some much needed back-end housekeeping on the site.

Regular visitors would no doubt have been noticing the site had slowed to a crawl recently; that was due to a number of things, not the least of which was we were using the same database as we did when the site first started in 2004.

To add to the problems, we couldn’t upgrade it because… well… we didn’t actually know where the database was anymore. Somewhere along the way (in 2005, as best as we can tell), we changed hosts but didn’t change our database settings, so for the last few years we’ve been using a database that, by rights, doesn’t actually exist. It’s one of those weird internet things where you close down an account but someone at the hosting company doesn’t delete it properly, and… well, that’s how the site has been running since. No wonder it was slowing to a crawl - it shouldn’t have even existed!

So we decided to finally take things down and rebuild the site from scratch with brand new Wordpress 2.5 software (seriously, if you’re still using Blogspot, it’s time to make the switch), a new mySQL 5.0 dbase, and some funky new behind the scenes tools that you’ll never know about beyond occasionally saying “ooh, how did they do that?”

Welcome to the newest new Notes From The Nat. Stick around, try the veal.

Addendum: Just to let folks know, the old comment system has been revamped. We’ve worked out a few new ways to combat comment spam, so you’ll find it easier to navigate the comment form now - let’s hear from you!