The End
As of 26 December, 2007, the Astronomicon is no more. This should surprise no one - in fact it may come as a relief that the drawn-out suffering it experienced over the last few months has come to a merciful end.
It was a rather long-lived site as far as blogs go - it was nearly five years old. In the beginning, it was all hand-coded (poorly) as I taught myself the basics of HTML. Eventually it made the leap to MovableType and began to blossom, until trolls and spammers caused a shut-down. Wordpress came next, and the blog chugged along merrily for a few years.
The first spin-off was the Saturday Football Update. It appears this site is still going strong due to the efforts of DFM and Snakeye. Although the Astronomicon will no longer be updated, the domain will remain hosted for the foreseeable future. Dan and Snake will retain admin privileges over there and are free to keep up the Saturday Football Update tradition for as long as they desire.
The main site will remain as it is, frozen in time. Several of the rebuilding guides for the SKS and Mosin Nagant still get quite a few hits each month; hopefully this resource will continue to be useful for people discovering the world of mil-surps. The thousands of screen-grabs I’ve posted over the years are popular in google images, so I suspect this site will still rack up hits as people come to grab them.
Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun with the Astronomicon. Via the discussions here I’ve met quite a few people whom I’ve never met face to face, yet I consider good friends. Several have emailed me to ask what was up with this site, so I decided to write this last post rather than just fade away. It is pretty clear that I have poor impulse control and will certainly be writing again sometime in the future. Just not here. I imagine that people who were interested in what I had to say will find me again eventually.
If I’m still around in 2013, I may make a 10 year anniversary post, so look forward to that.
-Astro