Aeon's EVE

After my big server fiasco in 2010, all relevant posts are now online again over a year later. I even had to write a special filter in PHP that allowed me to import all the posts I had saved from Google’s cache. That way I could add them to the blog as drafts. The most work was uploading all the screenshots again and re-linking them manually. I’m really glad it’s all back now

I added a page that lists all post titles as a quick archive in the upper site navigation, and I have a few plans for the future of the blog. I will definitely keep posting, but as always I’ll do it at my own pace. It started out as a means to record my EVE adventures for myself, and even if it went somewhat beyond that’s still its core mission. I’m by no means a blogaholic, nor do big posts come to me easily – so I prefer to spend the time I need on them to be able to post something I’m comfortable with.

The upside of this was that I was forced to re-read most of the posts, and re-lived part of my earlier adventures. Some of the older posts nearly went into the bin, especially the one where I was showing off a Maelstrom fitted with lasers, for example. I could not delete it though, it’s part of the story…

Now that the past has been reborn, I can finally put my energy back into writing some new content! Here’s to a bright future for EVE so the adventure may never end

[UPDATE]: I have started restoring the posts from the captain’s log. It seems I was able to collect nearly all of them

Yes, Aeon’s EVE has seen its share of troubles lately. One of my server’s RAID drives died, and my webhoster managed to turn a neat failsafe system into an utter nightmare. For some obscure reason it was not possible to recover some of the data, among which was the Captain’s Log database. To make a long story short, the entirety of my three years of EVE blogging is gone.

Or is it? A good hot bathtub will do wonders to relax, and that’s where I got my idea. Desperate times call for desperate measures – in this case, raiding the google cache. Google has a copy of almost every post I ever published in its cache, and even if it is a daunting task to retrieve them that way, I prefer that to just letting it go.

The devil hides around every corner though. Can you believe that my data retrieval spree was ended by none other than google itself? I made a search within my domain name, and patiently right-clicked and saved all the cache links. Until google told me that I am probably an evil robot leeching its pages and rather politely but firmly told me to get lost. I was speechless, and stared at the message for a while, wondering if a heavy battle axe could be a solution in this surreal situation.

The thing is, I did not get this far just to give up. I will wait until the IP ban is lifted and finish what I started… there were only three result pages left. The interesting part will be writing a small PHP script that will extract the post data from all the bits of HTML I saved.

Anyway, here’s to hope and unconditional optimism.

Cheers and fly safe,

- Aeon.