Let’s Get Personal

A Year in Blogging (or Not)

I could spin some smooth and nostalgic prose about how this time of year is perfect for gazing back on those things we have accomplished and looking ahead toward the year before us, and — blah, blah, blech. You get the point. I won’t do that. But since I have been gone for almost exactly a year, and it is practically the New Year, I suppose I must do a little filling-in on what personal details I neglected to share with the internet in 2007. And so, without further ado…

Here’s what I haven’t blogged about, in (more or less) chronological order:

• Rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon with my mom. In July. For a week. During record-breaking temperatures.
• Finishing up a year of night school classes, further securing my place as the second-most over-educated person in my family
• Ten days along the South Carolina and Georgia coast with the in-laws. In August. During record-breaking temperatures. (As you can see, I’m a master of timing.)
• My trip to Reno just before Halloween. Costumed hoards of people roamed the crowded thoroughfares of Circus Circus, sporting disguises reminiscent of swing dancers, vampires, and clowns, to name a few. I thought it was Reno. Turns out it was Halloween. I think.
• My new car. It’s purdy. And it even has an outlet so that I can charge my laptop, make coffee, or toast a bagel while driving. Very handy.
• My brother’s lovely wedding to his lovely wife in a lovely setting.
• My new iPod, and the day when it was stolen — and then not.
• Losing twenty pounds. Then gaining five of them back, just in time for a new New Year’s resolution. Three cheers for holiday eating…

Here’s what I have blogged about:

• Santa is a stalker
• Snot
• My cat
• The day an evil company stole my blogs

As you can see, my priorities are on the right track.

Hijacked!

It’s been a year since I’ve blogged new content with anything resembling regularity. At that time I was happily ensconced in another domain, running both a photoblog (Photoplay) and a regular blog (Novelist in Training). I had commenters and archives and an exhaustive blogroll. I had templates to tweak any time I couldn’t think of what to write next (which was entirely too often).

Not that all was perfect. I’d taken on a new job and begun taking two night classes each week, so things were hectic. My posting rate slowed. I committed mass absenteeism from all the blogs I used to frequent. And then one day I mustered up the words for a post, only to discover that my host — and my domain right along with it — had been sold out from under me. No warning. No chance to inform my readers, set up site redirections, double-check my backups, take a snapshot of the template, or find a new host. My blogs, along with all the contents, feeds, and information on all my commenters, had been hijacked even as I tried to think of what to write about next.

I’d like to say I took it calmly, and at first I really did. But soon the emotions crowded in: anger at the violation of having my sites yanked out from under me without warning, frustration and despair at the prospect of having to begin all over again, sadness over the posts and comments that had vanished and, most of all, embarrassment that subscribers and visitors to my site would be confronted with ads instead of blog posts. They would think I’d abandoned them, given up without a word. The thought made me cringe.

In the ensuing year many of those who had linked to my sites discovered my abrupt departure and removed the links. Some bloggers have gained a wide audience and are now out of my league, while others have folded. Many, I’m sure, have forgotten me — after all, what’s one more blog, especially from one who proved to be so unreliable (even if unintentionally so)?

But I’ve had this time to recover, to miss blogging enough to make it worth the tedium of setting up a brand new site and re-building everything from scratch. And so I am back. My blog backups, which I had made so religiously, were corrupted (yet more fuel to feed all that anger and despair), but I was able to salvage some of the posts nonetheless. Lest they be lost in the abyss forever, I will be integrating those old posts with new as I build this site, selecting only what I feel are the best and/or most appropriate at the time. Most of the entries (such as this one) will be new.

With time, I hope that those who were hurt by my sudden disappearance will trust me again and begin to visit this new blog; I know that I will be visiting their sites again. I will take it slowly, deliberately, but with any luck this time I will be in it for the long haul.

Yes, it really is good to be back, even on a nearly-blank blog with (as of this point) no readers. And so I will send this post out into the wilds and continue to build anew. Wish me luck, gentle reader.