You know, I’ve been blogging for many, many years and over the course of my online life I have had more than a few domains and — like many — hosting providers. Changing “home base” or hosting platform is never fun because the idea behind something like “a blog” is that it’s a forever home for thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Before social media, it was a way to connect with a community and in order to do that one needs a solid, reliable foundation to which friends can return to.

I’ve moved blogs more times than I really wanted to, including today. You are reading this post from a new location, although the site might look the same to you. I realized last night that this site was offline, and I couldn’t say how long it had been offline for. Everything looked OK on the server as far as I could see, but the site was simply inaccessible. As I had been running it on a machine that is stuffed into a closet under the stairs (literally) that had been assembled courtesy of whatever information I could find on the Internet, my ability — and willingness — to troubleshoot this situation was at an all-time low. I had moved the site from a hosted platform to this home server not even one year ago from the publishing of this post in a bid to save money and because I was in the throes of the whole “DIY” movement following the collapse or impending collapse of Twitter. Prior to that I had moved around a few times looking for an affordable, performant host, had registered and de-registered several domains (not all by my choosing), and had originally gotten into blogging when I was working for a web development company that let me do whatever the hell I wanted with company servers. If I had an unbroken line back to my very first post sometime in 1996-ish, then I’d have thousands of posts comprised of hundreds of thousands of words, and several gigabytes of images.

As of now, I once again have only what you see here. Because my self-hosting situation was container based, it was difficult — but not impossible — to access. Thankfully I had to foresight to expose my uploads directory to the host server so I have been able to secure all of my images from 2024. After my last post-apocalypse I had been using a backup solution for the WordPress content, but that failed me (or rather I failed me) as the last backup on record was from October; I haven’t been as prolific lately as I have been in the past, but I know I had a few posts online after October 25th. The pattern of losing posts either to technical issues or my own stupidity was enough to get me to take backups seriously, but apparently not as serious as I had meant to.

So here I am again with 2025 sallying up the walkway to my front door as I am prepping 2024 to escape out the back, and I am starting over again. Not completely…thank gawd…because if I were staring down the barrel of a completely blank database I don’t think I’d care enough to continue. As it is I’ve been trying to think of topics to write about that didn’t bore me half-way through writing them, so I don’t think not having a shingle out on the Internet would have made much of a difference in my life for the first time in…oh…almost 40 years. Damn.