In January 2001, I started this blog. I'd left my job at the San Jose Mercury News, where I was an op-ed columnist and editorial writer, to write a book on a start-up charter school. I had no idea the mainstream media was about to implode due to competition from online ads. I thought I could get another newspaper job whenever I wanted one or perhaps make a living self-syndicating. (Hah!)
Blogging was brand-new. I liked what Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan were doing with it, and saw it as a way to keep in touch with my readers while I wrote the book and brand myself as an education writer. (I thought the book would take about a year. Hah again.)
My brother David helped set me up with Blogger, as I recall. At some point, I switched to WordPress. I developed the illusion that I knew what I was doing. (Hah! Hah! Hah!)
By June 17, when the blog went down, I was using GoDaddy (domain), LeaseWeb (hosting), CloudFlare (security?) and WordPress (platform). For a day, I didn't realize I'd lost access to the admin site, which lets me update the blog, because we were all at a family wedding and were busy meeting and greeting and, as it turned out, getting infected with Covid.
At some point, I realized there was an alternate blog using posts from 2017 that I could see and even update: I added a post saying the blog was a fake. I guess whoever did it, cut me off from the real blog. Why? I don't think the fake blog had any traffic. What was the point?
Then, in an attempt to solve the problem, my brother did something involving "nameservers" that erased joannejacobs.com. Nobody could see it. My email, which is based on my domain, stopped working. I came to miss my spam. Attempts to solve it failed because they (I can't remember who) kept sending emails to me at joannejacobs.com, which didn't get through.
Various IT people promised to solve the problem in 24 to 48 hours or 72 hours or perhaps longer. I thought of the New Yorker cartoon: "What about never? Is never good for you?"
Meanwhile, Covid had turned me into a coughing, sniveling, raspy-voiced zombie. I got off the cold pills and partially de-zombified. But, 12 days after the first cough, I still test positive. So does my husband, who had symptoms for less than two days.
I thought of moving to Substack, but that would require writing columns. I like blog posts. Or I could do a bloggish Substack, I guess. I want to wait till my brain returns from Covidville.
My brother and I decided to restart the blog on a new platform, with clean code and a simpler design. That means I have to learn to use Wix, but it's not that different from WordPress and is less of a target for hackers.
If you can read this, we've relaunched the blog.
Let me know: I can see the page in Safari, but not in Chrome. Why? I don't know. Now, I can see it in Chrome, but a reader says it can't be reached in Firefox.