changes ahead

Faithful readers, this may be the last post on this blog. My longtime hosting provider, Reclaim Hosting, has recently made a number of changes to their security procedures, and those procedures have broken the workflow that I have had here for more than a decade. They have also let me know that they will do nothing to restore that workflow, and the increasing terseness of their replies to my queries indicates, with an equal absence of ambiguity, that they can’t wait until I take my business elsewhere. 

So I am trying to transfer the hosting of this blog to micro.blog, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out. Manton Reece, the developer and owner of micro.blog, is a great guy, but when it comes to support he’s a one-man band, and I don’t know whether the transfer will work at all and, if it does, how long it will take. 

I’ve long been a member of the own-your-online-turf brigade, but I have also been aware that we don’t really own our turf, and I am feeling very vulnerable right now. One of the consequences of the move, fifteen years and more ago, of almost everyone online to social-media platforms is the absence from the open web of technological semi-literates like me. Manton is a great guy and devoted to his customers, but almost all his communications with me assume a level of knowledge that I don’t have; and the people at Reclaim, as I have said, just want me to be gone. 

I have always disliked Substack, but I’m beginning to see why people move to Substack, which handles all these problems for them. I would just say to the proponents of the open web: If you want more people to move onto the open web, you have to be more patient with them than you’ve been with me, and you have to be willing to provide more basic instruction than, so far, you’ve been willing to provide to me. 

I can’t claim that I am a really good thinker, but much of the best thinking I have done has been on this blog, so I will do everything I can to keep it up. I don’t know whether I will be able to write on it any more, but I want people to be able to read it if I can possibly manage it, even if I have to pay two different hosting  providers. 

Until all this gets sorted out, you can find me at my micro.blog site. And if you’re praying people, pray for me, because all this crap is stress-inducing and exhausting. And I really do fear that I am going to lose my place on the open web, which would be terrible for me as a writer. Many, many periodicals want me to write for them, but only if I write what they themselves would write or want to see out in the world. My friends at the Hedgehog Review may be the only people who are interested in what I want to write. Everywhere else I have to trim my sails in ways that I find harder to do as I get older. If I lose my place on the open web I will be seriously incapacitated.