SharperIron 2.0

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About two weeks ago, I received a phone call with news I didn’t want to hear. I was told that SharperIron’s hard drive had crashed. Worse yet, I was told the site hadn’t been backed up since October 25th, 2005. We sent the hard drive to a recovery specialist, but the data was irretrievable.It’s hard to get upset at our hosting service. They have given us free hosting since the day we began. And we are not a small site. So, what are the damages?Well, the good news is that we have not lost any of the articles on the site. We have them all stored and over the next seven days we will have them all up and archived by topic and author. If you would like to help Greg Linscott with this project, email him at greglinscott@sharperiron.org. He would appreciate any help you can offer.

We have lost all discussions in the forums since October 25th. For that, I apologize. Many of you have invested long hours in debating, thinking, and posting your thoughts. If you by chance have saved any forum discussions feel free to re-post them. Also, we have also lost all new member information since that day. Therefore, if you joined the site after that day, you will have to re-register. This affects about 600 members.

After the team took a dose of Prozac, we started putting our heads together about what to do next. We have wanted to make several changes to the site and felt this was as good a time as any. So, here are the changes:

1. New design – Austin Matzko has done a superb job of creating a new design that, in spite of using multiple pieces of software, blends SI into a unified site.

2. New software – We have changed out the front page from vBulletin software to WordPress. This allows us to have several features that we previously didn’t have such as trackbacks, posting options, and a better archiving system.

3. New side blog – Our authors put a lot of work into their articles and we like them to get “top-of-the-fold” exposure for most of the day. However, the blogosphere is regularly hopping with news, ideas, articles, and interesting tidbits that we want to share with our readership. The new side blog, Filings, allows us to accomplish both.

4. Backup - We have taken steps to insure that this will not happen again. We will be being backed up on a daily basis.

As for the core purpose of SI, we will continue to publish news and ideas from a wide range of fundamental Christians.

It has become increasingly evident over the past several months that SI has become much more than a blog, but a true web community. I have missed the community over the last several weeks and can’t wait to get caught back up with how everyone is doing. I trust you will enjoy the new SI!

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