The other day, a literary and digital arts project — stored in amber at 52ndCity.com — was hacked and the contents of the site were lost. These were pieces that accompanied eight print magazines and one CD, produced in themed editions in the early 2000s. There’s no backup of the pieces and no way to recover the material. I described the feeling of loss at my Substack.
The experience gave me pause and I went into a personal archival recovery mode, which is now on day three or four. In looking at my digital life, I noticed that a lot of content I produced for magazines and websites is now unavailable, those items on hacked pages or sites that’ve abandoned good storage/search options. Even pieces that written about me, or featuring me, are gone. Dead links everywhere, a digital history made incomplete.
Over time, a number of personal projects have faced similar, inglorious ends: thesamefivequestions.com; halforderfriedrice.com; the entire site of the St. Louis Beacon, which featured dozens of my stories. Other sites remain (e.g. The Riverfront Times) but in an altered state. Hundreds of pieces and entire sites… gone. Strange.
At the beginning of this week, the blog on this homepage had 542 postings, dating back to 2005. These have been trimmed to just over 20. Lots of the early posts were time-specific or so irrelevant that they were easy cuts. Others reflected the time, essentially Facebook posts before I was uber-active on Facebook. Over the next week, as I finish up a short stint in a walking boot and with work at a minimum, I plan to keep diving into the digital footprint that I’ve created over the past three decades. It’s a fascinating process and sometimes embarrassing, for sure. But it’s proven worthwhile.
I’ve cleaned up ever page of this site, with updated links.
My social media presence remains pretty minimal, but I plan to make Substack more of my creative life going foward. My page, Memory Hall, remains live here.
While the loss of all that great, collaborative content at 52nd City still stings, the incident gave me a needed moment to reflect and move on. This site’s thorough spruce-up’s an early example.
And, with luck and a bit of energy, there may a new project to highlight here in 2025.
Onward…!
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