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Sunday, October 20, 2013

A Tale of Two Journals

"I felt a great disturbance in this thing of ours, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
-The Chairman
10/14/2013

Doc here, a man some say can hypnotize you with his mustache, with a long overdue statement on what The Journal was prior to 10/14, and what The Journal 2.0 will be.

I originally planned on just rebooting the site and moving forward. However, between getting a ton of e-mail and Tweets about the crash and restart, and a discussion I had at an adult theater last night with a bunch of readers and a couple of my reporters that were there, I felt the need to say this once, and move on.


Our story begins, as these stories often do, with a sense of success, and eventual failure.

Sunday 10/13: The Good Doctor's server was acting erratically, and I spent a few hours getting the Lizardo 9000 back running smoothly. Or so I thought.

Monday 10/14: Columbus Day. The day of my people. My server suffers a catastrophic failure mid-afternoon. Down goes Frazier... Down goes Frazier. The referee counted to ten, and it stayed down.

Not to fear... I have a good backup file. Right? Wrong.

I pulled the site offline to drive traffic off the site. That's when the private firewall came up, and my e-mail exploded. I would work on the restore, and then pull it back to public status.

During the restore, it failed. I won't bore you with the geek stuff. As a result, I successfully loaded four years worth of gibberish onto the site, overwriting the existing site. A few threads remained, but for all intents and purposes, it was toast. I spent close to twenty hours performing CPR to the site, before it flat lined. I called a priest to administer the last rites, but he had a problem with the patient's contents.

R.I.P. Lizardo 9000. We hardly knew ye.

The Good Doctor was this close to handing back his medical degree (St. Cunnilingus College, Class of '89) and riding into the sunset. 4 years. 1,840+ reports. Gone. I was pissed off, angry, and sick all at the same time. The Journal was getting 20,000 page views a day. And now... Poof.

I walked away from it for a day, gathered my thoughts, and reached out to my support network (a huge thank you to the folks I reached out to for advice, and the one's who reached out to me. You know who you are, and I won't forget. And for the one's I thought would be thoughtful and supportive, but never reached out or seemed interested, thanks. I will remember that too).

Wednesday 10/16: One day, and about half a dozen Bloody Marys later, I made up my mind: It was time for version 2.0 of The Journal of Adult Theaters.  I started from scratch, changed the look and feel of the site, and began again.

Version 2.0 will be different than the bloated, Tumblr-like version of The Journal. 2.0 will be report heavy and photo light. I will be focused on the words from my loyal group of reporters, both couples and singles.

The older reports are gone, kids... And even if I can resurrect them somehow, they won't be republished in 2.0 . I do have an archive of the original e-mails that the reports came from originally, so no need to resend anything to The Good Doctor.

Looking forward... I have several reports that came in pre-crash that I will edit and publish in the next few days. Keep sending in your reports, because I will get caught up the end of next weekend. We will continue to fight the good fight. To promote this thing of ours. To exercise our First Amendment rights.

It's good to be back.

Now where were we?

Thanks,
Doc