So this is something rather difficult for me to post considering how much time and effort I spent working on ZeldaBlog. If you were a regular visitor of the place, you might have noticed that the front page doesn't look anything like it once did. This black text on white background thing isn't exactly the comforting 16-bit graphics we all came to know and love.

The cause for it is something that, I must admit, is rather stupid on my part. On December 10, 2007, I was at my computer, enjoying a rather normal evening to myself when all of a sudden I heard a strange clicking noise. Sudden clicking noises are, I assure you, usually not good things, most especially when they seem to be coming from a computer. This one--as it were, happened to be coming from my server computer (namely, the device that's hosted ZeldaBlog since day one).

I knelt down there to listen to the computer, and the clicking seemed to be coming from the hard drive. Knowing that any sound a hard disk makes (other than a light, gyrational whirr) is bad, I immediately hit the power button to automatically turn it off. A minute later, the device still on, I bring up the monitor for my server to find the Blue Screen of Death™. "How wonderful." I hold the power button in to force it off and allow things to settle down for a good hour before turning it back on. However, the moment I did so, the familiar click-clicking started at once... and the computer froze before it could even think about Windows.

I've tried every suggestion I could come across, hoping to resuscitate it for just 20 minutes to get the last bits that were not backed up off the drive. I let it cool off overnight, I banged it against the floor, and I even placed my hard disk in my freezer for 24 hours. Nothing worked.

In short, the drive was toast. The precious bits stored within had all been lost to the Bit Bucket. (For all you non-programmers, the Bit Bucket is the "famous" imaginary place from which all bits come from. It is a wondrous land where zeroes and ones can frolic happily, and whenever a program needs to generate said binary digits, they are pulled from the Bit Bucket... and once they are no longer needed placed back.)

I have a backup of the site... if you can call it that. I've got all the pretty graphics (more or less) that were on the site. What I don't have is a full copy of the database that held the articles, the comments, and the like. I'm sure Google or the Wayback Machine have all of them archived somewhere, but the days have passed when I was so concerned about a fansite that I would devote myself undeniably towards fixing it.

Thankfully, most of my data had been backed up a while ago onto DVDs, had been archived by GMail (the most wonderful E-mail service there is), was sitting on my other (and more practical) computer, or had a physical copy made of it. Everything that was lost (thankfully) was stuff that was not critical. The Road to Ganon puzzle server code I wrote disappeared, but it can be rewritten. The site that I was working on for my fanfiction site is gone (but I hadn't worked on it in months and didn't see a time in the near future when I would), and a few Word documents probably got hosed, too. Nothing to cry over.

As such, due to my procrastination in making a backup copy of the database, a piece of ZeldaBlog is effectively lost into the Internet æther, never to be found again... and because of that, I've made the decision to euthanise the poor beast from its broken misery.

For all you readers who ritualistically read my articles and commented on them, thank you for the wonderful memories. I assure you: I will never forget the ride.