Learning as We Go: If you are a regular reader of the ASC on the Couch blog, you may have experienced problems accessing our blogsite recently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your patience as we work on alleviating these growing pains. Here is what has been happening over in our neck of the woods.

The Hack and the Back-up Crises: Last Thursday evening, our web hosting company was the target of hackers, who replaced everyone’s website with their own political announcement and blocked access to website content. Since it was the start of Labor Day weekend the next day, it took the web hosting company a few days to clean up the damage and get our site up and running again.

Then the next thing we knew, all of our blog posts and comments from July 17th through September 5th went missing last night. It turned out that the web hosting company’s technical support person had decided, without our permission, to restore our website using a July 14th back-up file. Apparently, unknown to us, it seems that the August/September back-up file was corrupted and useless. Why the tech person didn’t back up the perfectly fine website and blogsite before going ahead with the restoration is beyond us. Obviously, it is time for us to move on to another web hosting company.

Learning More Than We Bargained For: When we started our blogsite, we knew we were in for a learning experience. We can definitely say we have learned plenty about the technical workings of the blogosphere. This morning we just retrieved the 20 full-length missing posts from Technorati, a site for which we have newfound appreciation. Of course, we will be writing every post from now on in MS Word first, before even thinking about posting it online.

Smoother Sailing: Our goal is to get the missing posts back online soon. We are in the process of moving our website and blogsite to a new, and hopefully, more reliable, web hosting company with 24/7 support. In the meantime, if you are looking for a missing post, you can go to the green search box at Technorati and type in several key words from the post excerpt that can be found at DeafRead. Typing in the title itself doesn’t always work. Crossing our fingers for smoother sailing!