One week ago, a chain of events started. One the morning of my friend Vanessa’s wedding, one of the three hard drives which powered my server died. It dropped into a corrupted, but running state (as a RAID-5 array should), and continued to serve up information. Perhaps due to all the requests coming in for information on her wedding website (which I was hosting) from the newly corrupted hard drive, the system froze up. From that point, my array decided to split into two, each array trying to recover itself. RAID-5 arrays shouldn’t do this, ever. From this point on, my drives became more and more unstable and data started to corrupt. It was on borrowed time and was dying fast, and it was just a matter of time. I was able to save some of my critical data (tax records, etc) through low-level drive access, but the damage was more or less done. In the end, I lost over 1 TB of data due to this disk failure, and a significant chunk of my digital life.
Amazingly though, this has not affected me as much as I would have expected. It’s given me a chance to upgrade my server with more space and more memory, a new operating system and an upgraded copy of Wordpress. I’ve got to re-build my music collection, portfolio, and websites, but you know, all of these should have been re-built anyways. Data failures happen. Pouting about them doesn’t help anyone.
So, the swanktastic you’re looking at is built up again from scratch, but better and stronger. The last design worked out fairly well, so I’m keeping that around. However, I’ve updated some of the UI elements, and am releasing my first website with jQuery bits built in – which I believe will be the first of many. Instead of overlaying the first few sentences of a post on the image, you can expand and contract the details of the post by clicking on the image. So smoove. So, so smoove. The website should work better in IE7 and lower-resolution systems as well.
Oh yes, the wedding was impressively grand and everything went off quite smoothly.