Poised as we are today between the old and the new, now feels like a good time to explain the loss of my blog. For two months this autumn and winter I was locked out of my website during another attempt by the host company to update its underlying technology. That it worked this time round (I think) is the good news; that my entire blog – ten years of posts, almost 400 in total – has been lost in the process is the bad. The Truffaut film title, in translation and the original (Les Quatre Cents Coups, from an idiom meaning to raise hell), seemed appropriate…
For technical reasons, it says, the company “have not been able to find a solution [to] productionise the recreation of the [existing] blog”, and so the entire thing disappeared when migration took place. Re-posting that amount of material manually after the fact just wasn’t possible; or rather it might have been had the company engaged with the situation and me better and earlier, but that didn’t happen. This site exists so that I can share thoughts, conclusions and ideas with you, and it’s also my professional shop window. To see work that I’ve built up over a decade for interested visitors (including potential clients) to enjoy vanish overnight, therefore, is painful. Most of the posts were one-offs, but some comprised long-running series, such as a year’s worth of Books and Bricks, my recommended architecture publications; the months over which I have analysed the planning of the new City of London courthouse; and the weeks when I exclusively reported on the filming of Hollywood blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron in suburban London. All of that is now gone.
But there is a solution, of sorts.
As with the failed migration last year I will convert some of those items into articles, to be found via the menu tabs – the first of those, on the Grand Designs water tower, will go live in a couple of days under Architecture. And from time to time I’ll re-post some of them as blogs on this page, under the prefix A Lost Post, perhaps with a bit of added commentary from today’s point of view. It will soften the blow, if not four hundred of them! So let's see what the new year brings. Have a good one.
Hi Chris, I ran into your blog on Google randomly when I was looking at Sir Sterling Moss' residence. I think one of your article mentioned it, but I couldn't open the link. Now I know why. It's really sad to see all of your past articles are gone. I hope you are able to restore them sometime. Meanwhile, I'm reading through your articles on Big Picture and somewhere else. I really like all the discussions on architecture and film. Hope this setback won't stop you from sharing more of your thoughts online! Keep up!