Apologies for my brief absence from the web and the longer period in which comments did not work. Some morons in Brazil hacked my site Friday morning and replaced it with a Gmail address: I suppose they thought I would contact them and they could demand money or just make me grovel. No thanks. I spent 10+ minutes on the Gmail site and was unable to find any means by which I could report the apparent misuse of one of their accounts by my hackers. I guess I’ll add Gmail to my list of companies I will never (or never again) voluntarily do business with. If anyone is wondering, that list already includes Bank of America and Public Storage. (I have since gotten the Gmail abuse address from someone else, but no reply from Gmail.)

The only reason I was back up Friday evening is that I copied my Index file from the Google cache, edited out the various Google additions, and uploaded it. I was mildly surprised that it looked OK, less surprised that the comments and archives didn’t work right and that new posts failed to appear. Apparently my amateur Google-cache restore did not somehow connect with MySQL correctly. A Hosting Matters restore from backup has now solved the problem, and I didn’t even have to replace the subsequent posts, since they do separate backups of the main directory and the database. Restoring the former but not the latter seems to have done the trick. I guess I should have asked HM sooner.