Hello? Is this thing on?

Hello, music fans!

I guess I’ve been away for a while. After a not-so-minor disagreement with my former web host, I tried calling their bluff with a cancellation threat. Before I had a chance (or smarts) to buy back my domain, it was gone and a domain squatter jumped on it and is now, somewhat astonishingly, hosting a fake dental surgery page on the site.

Don’t give them the clicks — just believe me when I say it’s absolutely surreal. HaterHigh Dentistry: for all your oral surgery needs!

Ahem.

Anyway, the site’s updates had been growing fewer and further between. My job was getting more intense, I had a son (who’s since turned SEVEN!), usual family/circle of life stuff…there was just a lot of things drawing my attention and the website became an afterthought. Until, that is, it was gone altogether.

I was defeated.

I didn’t really think it was missed. Comments on posts had been almost non-existent for a while. Conversation-starters on Twitter were ignored. I thought maybe the need for a website like HaterHigh had gone and passed. After all, when I started this site, I was still linking to bands’ MySpace pages. Remember MySpace? … I don’t.

Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, BandCamp… these weren’t really things back then. Music was harder to get, harder to curate, harder to discover; there was a new musical age blooming by the time the blog went offline. Why would people visit HaterHigh when they could use these sites that offered a vastly larger library? Why would people download FLACs of concerts when almost every show is available to watch on YouTube, captured via 1080p (or even 4k!) video on the cell phones everyone has in their pockets. Surely, I wouldn’t be missed… would I?

In the last year, I’ve come across websites posting lamentations  over my site’s demise. I’ve found torrent sites are re-sharing my recordings, with heart-warming credits to me and memories of my site posted by the uploader. People who I’d befriended through the blog were reaching out, letting me know that yeah, OK, maybe I was missed.

And the itch to bring back the site grew.

I never thought my old host would call my cancellation threat/bluff, and I never thought I wouldn’t have the time/smarts to back up my data. But I thought wrong: the site was all but eradicated from the web, with Archive.org being the only echo of it. It’s backup was twisted, broken, full of holes, and somewhat incomplete; bringing it back would be a lot of work. Would it be worth it? Should I do it? Even if it would never be what it was?

The time for questions was over, and I got back to work.

Somewhat painstakingly, I went through the Archive.org backup of the site, and manually copy and pasted as many entries as I could track down. It was days of efforts, and there’s many more days left before they’re back to where I’d like them to be. If you’re visiting this site within the first months of it re-opening, you’ll probably find most links on posts prior to this one broken — still riddled with the archive.org versions of the original links. You may remember me posting a show (or two or three) that just isn’t here anymore. You’re probably right. But I was able to salvage the lion’s share of it. I’ll be working on it diligently over the next few weeks / months to update or remove links and get the site coherent again.

But the blog probably won’t ever be what it once was. As web-hosts have shifted to Solid State Drives, the amount of data they allow customers to purchase has severely diminished. I once had UNLIMITED storage, and hosted over 100GB of FLACs and MP3s. My current host allows me a grand total of…*drum roll, please*…10GB.

Unless I can come up with a better solution, my immediate plan is to host all the shows as high quality V0 MP3s, and probably host the last 3-5 blog entries as FLAC. Upon request, I’d also be willing to temporarily upload archived FLAC recordings, one-by-one, either through the site or through outside file hosting services. But it would, to some degree, all be back.

And that’s a good thing because (by my count) I still have over 100 recordings on my hard drive that never made it onto the blog — a good many of which have never been shared to anyone, and a few more that have only seen somewhat limited release.

I don’t get out to shows as often as I used to, but I’d love nothing more than to record and share the ones that I do get out to see. I may never again post with the frequency of the blog’s heyday, but I’m challenging myself to keep up with it.

So, welcome back to hater-high.com, formerly haterhigh.com, nee blog.haterhigh.com.

Thank you for coming back. Thank you for missing me. And thank you for reminding me that the site, these recordings, and yes, even these meandering blog entries have Value.

I think this old dog has a few more years left in him yet, and I’m glad you’re along for the ride.