Outage

Extended downtime over the past few days was caused by a major server calamity at the webhost end so my apologies to regular visitors. I keep backups of everything for precisely this reason—servers of all kinds can be subject to failure—but one of the problems with an increasingly sprawling site such as this (8,000+ files, 450 web pages, etc) is that restoring the thing from scratch can take some time. Reinstalling the database was the most difficult part but that’s been done without any loss. Normal service is now resumed. Thanks for your patience. And a belated Happy Bloomsday!