I was in California in December, doing a fellowship at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, when I got an email telling me my baseball website was down. A quick check revealed that the site had been hacked. While I have no way of knowing whether it was someone with malicious intent or just an opportunist who found a hole in my security, the vandal wrecked the joint. I had backups, but rebuilding it was going to be a huge chore.
My baseball site was born in the earliest days of the web. There were no off-the-shelf content management systems. There weren't even any WYSIWYG editors. I built hundred of pages by hand in Windows Notepad, crafting a site that at it's peak got over a million page views a month.
But the site languished. When I became editor of the baseball encyclopedia, I stopped making daily updates, and pretty soon those days of inactivity turned into weeks, and then into months and years. The site still draws a ton of traffic even though some of the content is horribly out of date.
But the hacking was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to tackle the task I'd put off for too long, pruning those outdated pages from the site, bringing the good stuff back out into the light, and putting everything into a nicer looking and easier to manage package using WordPress.
And now those three sites are merged into one: my blog, my archive of baseball reference content, and my book/author site. There all under one roof now at http://baseball1.com. I hope that those of you who have visited any of my satellite websites will find everything you're looking for at this new site, and hopefully even find something new.
If you're following this blog in an RSS reader, please follow my new feed at http://baseball1.com/feed/.
There will be no more posts or updates at http://seanlahman.blogspot.com/
