News from allaboutjazz.com | October 9, 2003
Promote Your New CD @ AAJ -- Here's How...
AAJ: ALIVE AND KICKIN!
As many of you are aware, All About Jazz was off line for several weeks. We've been working diligently to restore AAJ and we should be fully functional by this weekend.
Those of you who visit the site daily know we've been back publishing new articles and reviews for over a week now.
We would like to fill you in on what happened, and we will also need your help. Please take a moment and read on.
 WHAT HAPPENED?
SILVER LINING
HOW YOU CAN HELP
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS...
AAJ is proud to showcase the following CDs: pianist Taylor Eigsti's Resonance, organist Tony Monaco's Paesanos on the New B3, vocalist LM Pagano's Azalea, and Larry Coryell, Badi Assad & John Abercrombie's Three Guitars.
Show your support of AAJ by clicking through to these artists' websites and listening to music from their latest releases.
You can also hear songs from all the CDs mentioned above on our companion radio station, The Jazz Excursion.
Click here for more information about AAJ's artist promotional services.
WHAT HAPPENED?
An unknown hacker penetrated the AAJ server and ran a program that scrambled the data on the AAJ hard drives. Despite our best efforts (which have accounted for most of the delay), we were unable to resuscitate those drives. Disastrously, the last backup we were able to retrieve dates from May 19, 2003.
In order to bring all the lost material back into print, we've sought help and received a generous outpouring from contributors, artists, readers, industry people, and friends.
Our good friends Carl and Becky Malamud at http://museum.media.org are fans of AAJ, and they volunteered to help us compile the missing CD reviews that were cached at Google. They were successful in recovering over 60% of the missing CD reviews and we can't thank them enough for their assistance.
Thanks to our staff, the remaining 200+ missing CD reviews and 330+ articles are making their way back into the archives. Many of these pages need to be re-edited and re-formatted, so this process will take a few more weeks to complete.
Three bulletin board members have downloaded several hundred discussion threads and we plan to restore them next week. Thanks "EKE BBB", "Swinger" and "mmilovan"!
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A New Server...
This whole process has predictably slurped a whole lot of resources (both human and monetary) from our hardly overflowing coffers, but we will recover.
At this point we have built a new server that is secure. We will also be making regular, timely security upgrades to the operating system. This will help prevent hackers from accessing our hard drives and doing future damage.
And most importantly, we'll have multiple levels of data redundancy and data backup, so something like this will never happen again.
An Improved Website...
We had to rewrite several key scripts that make AAJ hum. This process took a while, but it also afforded us the opportunity to improve how things work. We're now posting links to recent CD reviews on the home page and we've created three new landing pages; we like to call them "centers."
CD Review Center
Article Center
News Center
With a new look and improved search capabilities, these three centers represent a big step forward. Please feel free to bookmark the new pages.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
If you have downloaded any part of the site from May 2003 to September 2003, please email the HTML page(s) to Michael Ricci at recovery@allaboutjazz.com. If you've downloaded over 50 pages, please burn them to a CD-R and mail it to the PA address listed on this page:
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/contact.htm
We'll send you a free jazz CD for your efforts. We still need a lot of help getting everything restored, particularly the bulletin board and company directory sections.
If you became a bulletin board member after May 19th, please re-register here:
http://forums.allaboutjazz.com
We sincerely appreciate any help you can provide in our attempt to get AAJ back on track.
All the Best!
Mike, Chris, Nils and the entire AAJ Staff
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