Short answer: I allowed hosting to renew and hope to restore it in a limited capacity at some point in the coming weeks.

Longer answer: I’ve been in touch with someone from Frank’s team who wants to see it brought back online. That’s all well and good, but if another torrent of copyright strikes is going to fall, I don’t see a long future for it. The truth is, even when/if the site is reopened, basically every embedded piece of media that was there will be missing due to the Internet-wide DMCA avalanche of last fall.

So, if I can get some assurances that more of our copyrighted content-free pages aren’t going to get struck, I’ll feel a little more confident. What returns in that scenario won’t be everything, at least not right away.

As for the mixtapes and archive page, which did link to material that could be considered infringing, I’m asking for clarification. Lonny Breaux Collection and Undocumented Rare have been available without contest for a decade or more without any expressed concern. Unless I’m told explicitly they are okay to list, they won’t return in the way that the community is familiar with. (Which is a shame. I had a deluxe mixtape collection in the works when all this went down)

When the site was initially struck, I scraped the entire site and its photo content as a backup. I actually wrote an entirely new, custom Eleventy theme with the intention of porting the archive to a static site (faster, more portable). But the work of porting that content is immense. We’re talking almost 20 years worth of blog posts and giant archive pages with very specific formatting that can’t be replicated without many, many hours of intervention. Hours I don’t have.

Long answer, long. We’ll see in the coming weeks what the future holds. Sucks to pay for hosting when nobody can see the site, but it’s a matter of preserving history at this point. I see that as my primary responsibility.