I have my personal blog going again at danahuff.net. I am in the process of restoring my Harry Potter and genealogy blogs. Once I do, I’ll link those, too. It’s been a lot of work, but I think I’m on the right track. Because I had migrated to Word Press from Movable Type on the personal blog early in January, I was able to rescue most of the posts on that blog. I had exported the file. However, I had never done so for any of the other blogs, including this one, so I fear those entries are gone. I am going to try to rescue some of them from various web caches, but I learned a lesson. Back it up. You just never know what will happen, and I can’t think about losing all that writing too much or makes me sick.

Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts has been completely restored. I have uploaded some of the instructional Power Point presentations, but a few of them are on my computer at work, and I’ll need to get those uploaded from work. I have also uploaded many of the handouts I use, but not in pdf form yet. Again, those are on my computer at work.

I do not yet have my ideas or lesson plans pages ready. I’m working on restoring those pages.

For readers of my personal blog, my genealogy blog, and my Harry Potter site, please be aware that I am moving those sites to a separate domain. I’m still waiting for that domain to be connected to the servers, but I will announce here when things are ready.

The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt’s radio blog seems to be up and running again.  I will try to get the radio blog for the Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts activity up this weekend.

I’m afraid I haven’t had time to try to work with the Radio Blog files on the Gatsby and Romanticism pages yet, but the Radio Blog on the Hurston page appears to be up and running. Let me know if you have trouble with it.

I’m not sure, but I think the blogs that appeared on this site are gone for good. It makes me very sad, as it represented about two and half years of writing, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’m complained about my host to the Better Business Bureau.

In case you’re wondering, essentially what happened is that my host was bought by another company. My site was taken offline and replaced by a placeholder page. However, the fact that this transition was about to occur was not related to my former host’s customers. In fact, they have always been very bad about communication when they will be making updates that will cause downtime. Anyway, this was one time too many, and I lost confidence in their abiliy, so I switched to Bluehost, and I’m very happy so far.

It is probably going to take a significant amount of time to restore some of this site, but I should explain some of the changes I intend to make.

1. My education blog will now appear here, at this URL — https://www.huffenglish.com/. It was formerly at https://www.huffenglish.com/blog/.
2. My classroom site will appear at its own own subdomain: http://class.huffenglish.com/. It was formerly at https://www.huffenglish.com/class/. This is not live yet, but I’ll update when it is.
3. My personal non-education related sites, including my personal blog, my genealogy blog, and my Harry Potter blog will all appear at their own domain as soon as it’s online. I will unveil that when it’s active.
4. The classroom wiki and lesson plan wiki were hosted offsite and are unaffected by my hosting problems.

In case you missed it, I wanted to take this opportunity to announce that my piece “Toward ‘Moral Perfection’: Integrating Judaic Concepts and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography” will be published in July 2006 in English Journal. This issue’s theme concerns teaching practices in private, parochial, and independent schools. Look for it!

Much apologies to my visitors as I try to repair the damage done when my old host, Maxipoint, Ltd., decided to take down my site without telling me first and went days without explanation, by which time I tired of their shoddy business practices and non-existent support and moved in at Bluehost.

It will take some time to get this site back in the shape it was in. Unfortunately, I believe most of my blog entries are lost forever. My former host is either unwilling or does not know how to give me access to my files.

So far, I have managed to restore

• The Great Gatsby
• The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt
  
• Witch Hunt: A Web Scavenger Hunt for The Crucible
• Romanticism: A Movement Across the Arts
• Their Eyes Were Watching God: Zora Neale Hurston and the Folklore Tradition

Please note that the music files in the Radio Blogs on The Great Gatsby Treasure Hunt, Romanticism, and Zora Neale Hurston are not yet functional. I will be working on restoring these this evening and will update when I have.

Please bear with me as I rebuild this site.

Update: I am unable to get the Radio Blog files to work, and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.  I will keep at it and let you know what happens.

I have some updates to announce. First of all, I have updated the lesson plans page (my handouts). Most of the handouts are now available as either Rich Text Format (rtf) or Portable Document Format (pdf). I have added a completely new lesson plan handout based on Discover Schools’ Lesson Plan for Great Books: Walden. My recommendation would be to do this particular lesson with gifted or honors classes. Finally, I have added two new Power Point demonstrations: Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant) and American Transcendentalism. I’ve also updated the following pages to reflect these new additions to the website:

Upcoming, you can expect me to include new pages on teaching ninth grade, including grammar, composition, and literature. There are some handouts on the lesson plans page already.

By the way, if you are interested in American literature and want to learn more about the Fireside Poets, I highly recommend Matthew Pearl’s novel The Dante Club, which I reviewed in more detail elsewhere. I have to say that I always teach the Fireside Poets in a cursory manner, but this year, after reading this book, I had a new appreciation for them.

It’s been a while since I posted any new lessons, and I still need to convert some of my documents into PDF’s in order to make downloads easier for some. I have a full plate for much of this month, so I’m not sure when those site updates will happen.

Meanwhile, I wanted to direct your attention to the Teachers’ Lounge Wiki, a site where teachers can share their ideas with others. There are some fabulous lesson ideas there. I have had TLW linked in my sidebar for some time, but I can’t recall if I plugged in an actual blog post.

I have the site completely uploaded now. If you see any misdirected URLs or obvious mistakes, please e-mail me so I can get it straightened out.

Now I need to get to work on summer planning stuff; I’ve been procrastinating.

I want to thank anyone who happens to be coming by for their patience as I build this site. There are currently some holes and dead ends, and I am well aware that it is frustrating for browsers. Building a site is slow work.

I am still working on my Lesson Plans page, but an incomplete version of my Ideas page is available. Currently, I have several links to ideas for teaching units in American literature. You can find links to a lot of my lesson plans on those pages.

I have several online units or ideas available already:

• Witch Hunt: A Web Scavenger Hunt for The Crucible
• The Great Gatsby (links)
• Gatsby Treasure Hunt
• American Romanticism Web Quest/Declaration of Romanticism
• Their Eyes Were Watching God Folklore Activity