There is, er, something there. It appears to have a new story or two mixed in with old ones from 2006, all dated September 17th, 2011 or thereabouts. The software is not the Slashcode that Rocknerd v2 ran on, but appears to be mangled copies of the original content, roughly dumped into WordPress. The whois was previously registered to an eastern European domain squatter, but now names someone in Canada, with the IP address in the US. The site still claims to be run by Ben Butler and me. I haven’t heard from Ben in years.

What on earth? Does anyone have any idea what this is about?

(And if anyone cares that much, I do have a database dump from the tail-end of Rocknerd v2. But playing Gillian McKeith with the products of Slashcode is so tempting I haven’t even unzipped it in five years.)

Update: someone bought the domain name with plans to do new things with it and thought putting up the old content would be more useful than not while he works out what to do with it. (I suggested it should start afresh — and I really should get around to processing that database dump.) I look forward to his new thing.

Rocknerd v2 is still in the hands of a domain squatter, but the front page as of 2007 is up from archive.org. Would you like to buy this small piece of Australian music history? I need to pull some of my articles over from v2 to here.

And the domain squatter who’s got rocknerd.com tried to sell it to me for US$97, which I frankly couldn’t be bothered with.

The archive of my Perth ’80s–’90s Perth indie rock zine Party Fears has been updated, with the addition of a PDF of #11 and a more detailed list of what’s in what issue on the index page.

Dan Arndt on Wikipedia has also been working on the Australian indie rock articles, with small assistance from me, and I need to dip into the trepidation-inducing two boxes of old photos again. What I really need to do is what everyone else seems to do: pay a few hundred quid for a Nikon CoolScan on eBay, do all my photos and sell it on again a year or two later.

*cough* And then there’s the other sort.

I got sick enough of this with Squishdot. MySQL just ate itself all by itself and had to be restored from backups. Fortunately, I recovered both the last two posts from the LiveJournal feed. Next: taking a daily backup myself. At least I’m not actually paying for this hosting …

I stopped by the Wayback Machine yesterday and found a pile of classic Rocknerd. This is slowly being hand-restored. (Mostly my own stuff first.) 2001, 2002, 2003! Comments not restored yet (if ever).

If you’re on LiveJournal, there’s now a Rocknerd syndicated feed. I’m also making regular summary posts to aus.music. I’m also trying out the Subscribe2 plugin to give email alerts for new posts. Your ideas on other nice extensions are most welcomed.

The old rocknerd.org domain is now in the hands of a domain squatter. Looks like you’re now reading the real remaining Rocknerd. Hi, Ben!

Ben has been eaten by voles. He still has the old domain name, for what that’s worth. This is Rocknerd v3. I hope to do something useful with the data files from Rocknerd v2 (porting them from Slash to WordPress). There’s a pile of addons for WordPress which should make this less sucky. Including a skin that makes it look less like the world’s most boring blog — suggestions most welcomed. Have fun!

Rocknerd.org gets all sorts of things submitted through the ‘post article’ web form – lots of press releases, lots of faintly-disguised press releases, illiterate dribble from the single-celled variety of music fan, and every now and then something good enough to be worth putting up.

Today we got a Make Money Fast chain letter. Submitted through the web form. Rule 3, indeed.