Captain's Blog: Heeeeere's Johnny!

Before we get on to all the new stuff that I’ll be dropping here over the next several days, months and years I feel a word of explanation is necessary.

Let me tell you a story…

Once upon a time, I had a website. That website had grown in popularity in the twelve years I ran it (specifically Halloween 2010 to Halloween 2022). I had my film reviews up there, some blogs, some retro features about older movies, and it hosted my annual Shocktober horror film festival, which I started back in 2006 in the wild days of MySpace being a blogging site.

To say the site was doing well is a bit of an understatement. In its last year, from Jan 1 to November 11 – it had attracted 18,665 visitors and was well on course to beat the 21,168 which was the previous year’s total. It had already beaten the 17,270 from 2020.

I was happy, and you, the readers seemed to be happy. So why did it suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth? This is what happened.

I had already renewed my contract with the web hosts for another year. All paid up, in advance as I always had. But a few days into the contract, the web hosts told me that my site would be deleted in January as they were “retiring” the “old platform”. I got in touch to see what options I had, and (naturally) they had a solution in mind. I could prevent losing my site and everything on it by agreeing to go on their new, “more stable” platform. This was an immediate cost rise of 50%, which I agreed to and paid.

I asked if a period of grace would be allowed so I could bring my material over. No need they said – we’ll handle everything for you "because you’re a valued customer with a legacy site". (Wow, right? I felt I was on to a good thing.)

Then, after a few days waiting, my content appeared on the new platform. Happy days. Happy days which lasted around 45 seconds before everything went shitshow sideways.

My home page was there, my second level pages, which introduced the actual content and articles were there…and then – nothing. All my articles were missing. That amounted to 180 pages of my written content gone. I don't even want to think of how many hours of work. Evidently, they only ever backed up two levels. Something I depended on them for, but I was never told they didn’t do. It was a catastrophic loss.

I have all that written content on my original Word files on my computer, of course. But I'd need to recreate all the pages from scratch before copying and pasting but I just didn’t have the heart for it right then. Plus, they'd lost all the images. They literally left me with nothing but seven pages and 180 dead links. All that work was suddenly gone, with zero accountability. (And I was PAYING THEM for this!)

I thought about it for several days, but every time I looked at it with a view to starting a rebuild, I just got more and more depressed. I literally hated seeing what was left.

So, I reluctantly took the decision to pull the plug and cancel my contract with a web hosting company that by now were suddenly getting difficult to get in contact with and harder to deal with when I was actually able to speak to them. Understandably, my trust and faith in them had gone by now.

I decided to take a break. I had, after all been writing somewhere or other since 1998, and I tried going to the multiplex and watching movies like a normal human being instead. No reviews, no write-ups. No end of year lists. By this time, I had decided to take all of 2023 off. But I discovered something about myself.

I discovered that not writing was far more difficult than actual writing. So, after a shade less than six months, I’m back. I’ve stealthily built this new site, which has echoes of the old, but I think is more streamlined and has a greater functionality than the previous. Incidentally, for nostalgia purposes, I discovered the web archive had taken a fairly recent but incomplete snapshot of the old site, and you can see it here.

My next big decision was when to launch it – the original was launched on Halloween 2010. We’re too far from Halloween, plus it’d mean missing out on Shocktober 2023 – and what would October be without Shocktober? So, Star Wars Day seemed doable and here we are. (I know it’s a little light on brand new material right now, but please bear with me as you have in the past.)

May the Force be with us all – and welcome back guys, I’ve really missed you.