OK. The Dreamhost database server went up in smoke yesterday, but never fear, the Dreamhost team was on it. They rebuilt the database from the backup. That’s great, except that backup was a week old and now a week’s blog posts have disappeared. They certainly weren’t world changing, but their loss got me to thinking about how the Cloud is taking care of me.

When the idea of putting my life’s work into the custodianship of the Cloud first reared it’s horned head, it was obvious that there was a giant fail point — did I really trust that Google (or Apple, or Microsoft) would really, forever keep my belongings safe and sound? It wasn’t a question of security and prying eyes at that time. It just seemed better to have all of my email, documents, and code at home on my very own computer, or on a CD-ROM, where it was safe.

But gradually I let myself be lulled into the idea that Google, with all its money, expertise, and not-evil intentions, could take better care of my email than I could myself. After all, even my hard drives fail; and I really don’t do regular backups; and laptops do get stolen, etc.  So, I slipped lazily into the fold and turned my digital life over to Google, Live, Yahoo!, and now Dreamhost.

And I was happy to do it. I no longer had to deal with the cranky spam filter in Eudora. With the virtual server humming away in the cloud, there would be no more of those nasty 2AM drives down to the co-location warehouse south of Market to talk a suicidal hard drive off the ledge. Blessed relief…

Now, with most recent glitch in the Matrix, I’m wishing I had those good old static pages sitting on my own computer, with no fricking database getting all funky. Oh, don’t get all excited — I’m not going to give up all of my Cloudy conveniences. But I am thinking of replacing this Steaming Pile of PHP and MySQL with Octopress.

In fact, I’m currently testing Octopress over at my CCSF blog. Is it better than the PHP/MySQL/Wordpress monster? I don’t really know yet. The really big questions is, will my life still be livable without my WP Super-cache plugin, and my AdRotator? We’ll see. All I have to do is convert all of these WP blog posts to markdown and I’ll be in business.

There must be a Wordpress plugin for that, right?