Well, this is a strange turn of events. Twenty-five years ago I was blogging every day, for at least fifteen minutes, sometimes a half hour, posting something I felt was thoughtful, witty, or even just interesting. I had readership, and there were comments.
And I’m not exactly sure what changed – perhaps I just got older…? Too busy?
Too something. I just stopped blogging.
And I moved a couple of times, and I tried to get back into it.
And I couldn’t.
I set an alarm that, every day for the past decade, has been going off at 19:00 to try to bother me enough to get back into blogging. And every day I’ve closed the notification, and thought, “I don’t got any ideas.”
But that didn’t stop me before.
And then, last year, I got hacked.
They had an important password, weren’t shy about pointing that out, and started emailing me that they would release something embarrassing to all my contacts if I didn’t pay them a bitcoin.
At the time, I was saving up money to move again, this time a big move. If I paid some unknown person/group a bitcoin, I’d have nearly bankrupt myself, ended my chance to move for another two years, and seriously extended an increasingly aimless phase of my life.
I really didn’t want to capitulate to some unknown person – I’d been brought low by events, I wouldn’t go lower for blackmail. Anything they had wasn’t embarrassing enough for me to zero out my accounts and go into debt. So I let it all go dark.
My hosting plan expired. My email accounts got deleted with it. Anything that wasn’t backed up somewhere was lost.
I transferred as many accounts as I could to other email addresses, and settled down to wait. Feesl.com was still registered to me for a while, so it would wait with me.
And two weeks ago, I started bringing it all back.
Last night I made a call to tech support to get advice on how to reopen the site, and ended up renewing my hosting plan and installing/configuring all this.
Not that it’s all back yet, I have no personalized theme, I don’t have user-selectable light/dark versions of those themes, my gallery is currently empty and I don’t have my NaNoWriMo stuff or my link list or anything else, yet…
You know, it kinda felt like walking out to a long-abandoned workshop and unlocking the door after years. I opened that door last night looked around at the dust and scattered debris of years of neglect, and coughed my lungs out.
Well, I spent last night “cleaning” (to continue the metaphor), and today I felt about ready to actually start working in this workshop again. Hence this post.
But, while I’m here – what the hell happened to the default themes in WordPress? I mean, twenty-eleven was a kind of throwback to the seventies or sixties that wasn’t great, but this new twenty-twenty theme? Or twenty-nineteen? Ugh. Can I say that typography can be art, but isn’t always art? I feel like that needs to be underlined a few times. Maybe even use the forbidden blink tag.
And this block editor is kinda different. It feels like the final post as I type, but it’s this quasi-final-product, quasi-editor that is going to need some getting used to. I like it, but it feels a little otherworldly. Things just happen in it.
Anyway, I’m in danger of kvetching myself into a corner (some would say too late) so let’s end this here.
I’m back. At least I think so. Thank you for making it this far.
I have more stories to share, hopefully you’ll be interested enough to come back.
And maybe, even, I can recover some of the posts made prior to the great shut-down…
Meh, no need to get ahead of myself.
Thanks for reading, readers. Please have some fun. Now that this is back, I think I just might.
N8ey/Nate
Skåll!!!