I’m ashamed to say that I did not adequately perform risk management with respect to my blog. I had hosted it ACSite.net for the past several years. The support response was great and you couldn’t beat the price.
Over the past year, I began to see cracks in their response time. I asked for more disk space and they gave it to me but there was a red flag in that they didn’t charge me for it or even ask for payment information. My support requests went unread. I tried to phone, but they did not list a phone number.
About two months ago when I was about to upgrade my b2evolution blog software, I decided that I am sick of updating blog software and maintaining my own site. I looked at migrating to blogger but there was no easy way to upload my 300+ posts from the b2evolution site. I suppose I could have used blogger APIs to write a transfer program. My period as a developer / technical IT guy has passed and I don’t care to relive it in my spare time.
I decided to come back to the problem.
As luck would have it, my problem of transferring my posts from b2evolution was solved! The clever folks at ACSite.net deleted my account. Actually, I am assuming that they deleted it since they provided no warning or notification. They have my current contact information.
When I went to write a post this week, my site was rudely replaced with the dreaded ‘your new site is available’ page. I tried to login to my cPanel account and no dice.
Gulp.
It was in 1999 when I started a blog because I was sick of writing my political diatribe to the CLUE talk email list. I was so upset over the election of George Bush and subsequent ‘war’ in Iraq that it fueled my amateur punditry. I kept writing because it is my creative outlet.
Given my background in web development, I became enamored with tweaking my blog, Greymatter. I moved it around several times to different hosting providers and different blog software.
As I thought for a minute about the 300+ posts and probably hundreds of hours I put into writing the collective works, I was not upset. I was dismayed. I wrote a lot of great posts but it is like losing a sketch book. I figured the best thing is to turn the page and write again.
Enter blogger. Sure, it lacks some of the advanced features of b2evolution but I just don’t care anymore about the mundane details of spam blocking. I am certainly sick of manually adding captcha plugins and the like.
Less is more.
I have been driving to simplicity in my life for the past year and the sudden loss of my past catalog of thoughts is strangely liberating. All the more ironic is the timing of the loss, when I am in the midst of days 4, 5 and 6 of the PMI Mile High leadership class.
This class is amazing and tiring all at once. Dr. Jerry Brightman from The Leadership Group facilitates our difficult journey from introspection toward effective leadership. Days 1, 2, and 3 were last August and since then, my thoughts, my certainties about my life have slowly leaked out of my brain.
I feel like my old self is dying, on life support for the past six months. I was testing myself to see if I will really pull the plug. ACSite pulled it for me. I’m excited about the changes that I believe are coming in my life. It seems appropriate that I am left with a clean slate, a new blog to begin another journey.
game on
Sorry to hear of your loss, but I am excited that I will be able to witness your transformation. Particularly, since we share the same leadership class and I also had the opportunity to read your postings…before they were vaporized.
I will be returning to ‘isuma’ because I don’t want to miss the caterpiller-2-butterfly metamorphosis!
All the best,
Jeanette
Well done in letting the past go. Perhaps we could all let go of some things.
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