It’s been a while since I posted anything on this blog. It’s not necessarily a case of laziness: in fact, I’ve been writing at least three postings a day for the last seven months for other people: just not here.
To be sure, there have been “technical” issues.
In the beginning, I hosted the blog with Blogger, but after they “upgraded” their back-end, I could never get the thing to work properly; either it wouldn’t create the archive pages, or it insisted on linking the damn thing to a folder which didn’t exist.
That meant that far from being a simple matter to write and post a few pars, the site needed rebuilding every time. To be honest, life is too short to do that on a regular basis.
Then, at the end of last year’s soggy summer, I had issues with my hosting company.
The site simply disappeared. I feared the worst, and it turned out that they had attempted to claim the annual fees via a credit card account which no longer existed, and then emailed me on the address they had shut down. So when the whole sorry mess was finally sorted out and I’d paid the £20 at the root of it all, I decided it was time to move the domain somewhere a little more communicative.
Thing was, the domain name and the hosting were a package deal, and the hosts (hostonce.com) seemed reluctant to let it go. Emails to them went unanswered. I got frustrated. And despite the hosting bill being paid, my access to the back-end control panel had not been reinstated. Sure, I was now getting emails to hisself@maxbrockbank.com, but neither I — or anyone else — could get access to my resume at maxbrockbank.com/cv or indeed any other page.
Just before Christmas, things took a turn for the worse when another of the hosting companies I used (PagesGarden.com) disappeared without trace. This was more critical, since it was home to a lot of websites I work on. I quickly took out another package with a reputable UK-based host (34sp.com) and moved all the “lost” websites there. That’s not as simple as it sounds: most of them had MySQL databases as a back-end, all of which disappeared along with the sites. The last of these was restored to order on New Year’s Day (although problems still crop up from time to time).
I decided it was time for another go with Hostonce, appealing to them with the fact that mb.com was my personal domain (in other words, it was unlikely that they could sell it on to a higher bidder).
Perhaps the post-holiday glow made them more attentive, but this time the message seemed to get through and I got the email saying I could transfer out. With mb.com now run via another domain host (go-daddy.com), I uploaded the site itself to 34sp.com.
That at least was one stroke of good fortune, for just a couple of weeks later I got the news I was being laid off, at least I had somewhere to post my CV.
Even so, it still took me another week to realise that it would be prudent — and even theraputic — to get my personal blog back on the rails.
So, here it is, Let’s Talk About Me, running on WordPress, and looking quite nice.
New readers start here …