Yesterday, I got an email from a friend who pointed me at my flagship site - KnowProSE.com. The site was - and presently is - down. So I emailed the host to find out that they had done a database (MySQL) update on December 13th and that their only backup was from December 14th. Given the fact that my life has taken some sharp twists and turns, I haven't been doing my own backups... as I should have been. The host did provide me with a backup from earlier this year, and I started working on it last night. I also stopped working on it last night.

So while what the host did seems very stupid, I have to admit fault. A site is supposed to be bigger than the host. And while KnowProSE.com represented 9 years of my writing at this point, I couldn't really explain why I immediately felt relieved. And here I am, feeling relieved.

When I first started writing in my teens, I had a habit of writing and then burning what I wrote. The process of writing was always more important to me than the result. Inadvertently, I've done it again.

The truth is that KnowProSE.com had become a massive juggernaut developed as I first set out using content management systems (Drupal). It had a lot of my ideas and thoughts as well as ideas and thoughts of other people. Truth be told, it was just a mess to manage and upgrade because of the fact that it wasn't focused on anything; it was focused on everything. To move it forward in any direction would have required a lot of work on my part - work that required time that I simply haven't had between dealing with land, business and other issues.

And so, all of this is an opportunity. It is a chance for me to reinvent KnowProSE.com from the ground up. Nothing I wrote was so valuable that the world would miss it too much; sure - the site got its fair share of credits from other sites when I was blogging assiduously, but all of that has already passed. The reasons it got Slashdotted and so forth have long passed.

There is an opportunity now to rebuild. I can rewrite what I think is important - and with more than 9 years behind me, I can do a better job of it. The quantity has gone down. The quality, as it is, will go up. All the mess of taxonomy is gone. All the mess of direction is still there without the constraints of all the old content. All the constraints of the outdated ideas that started it have disappeared.

A clean slate. Poetic, considering how much my life has changed in the last 9 years. And backups will be so much more manageable.

KnowProSE.com will be reborn. And it will be better than it was... it will just take time to rebuild. I expect I'll work on it tomorrow. Where once I would have mourned, I oddly find a sense of who I was when I started the site. Combined with what I have learned and applied over the last 9 years, it will be better.

A clean plate. It has been served up, and I walk to the buffet of my experience like a child - full of ideas, unhampered, unfettered - but more disciplined, more thoughtful, more technically competent.

I'm excited. A new adventure begins.