My thought is that everything online is only temporary.

   That particular concept was thoroughly tested yesterday. You may not have noticed, but this blog was all but offline for 24 hours beginning Thursday night. Nothing disappeared, thank goodness, but I couldn’t access any of the management tools for the blog, including editing and posting. No one could leave comments, either. (If you tried and failed, please try again.)

   I can’t explain things I don’t really understand myself, so I won’t go into details, but my son-in-law Mark says it was a “database server error.”

   While working our way through that, Mark discovered that there is a new hosting plan scheduled to take effect on March 28, after which certain incompatibilities (which I won’t even try to get into) will mean that all 13 plus years of blogging here on M*F will disappear. There may be an extension of the date, and (who knows) the “incompatibility” issue may be worked out, but in the meantime, I will be doing my best to back up and preserve as many of the thousands of posts as I can.

   If worst comes to worst, I will most certainly start over again. There’s only so much reading and watching I could do without being able to write about it all too, and I know that holds true for the many other contributors to this blog as well.

   And while I’m busy backing up an archive of the “Best of Mystery*File,” regular blogging will go on as usual. Count on it!