A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

So, after a quarter of a century, my domain PaulCilwa.com has been lost. It was by accident, but possibly also for the best. In any case, this is my first new post under my site's new home, cilwa.net.

What happened was, I received an email from GoDaddy.com, which I've used as web host in the past, and which my daughter has also used for sites of her own. Some of those I helped with; others, she's done on her own. This email was for our dog Finley's breeding web site, which we no longer need because Jenny changed her mind about breeding Finley; and he's been fixed. The email was to remind us to renew Finley's domain.

But we didn't want to renew Finley's domain. And, in trying to cancel his domain, I accidentally cancelled mine! Worse, I didn't even realize it for several days. I tried sending GoDaddy a request to fix this, but their automated help AI misunderstood my complaint and provided no further direction in which to proceed.

Potentially, this could be a huge loss. If mine were a commercial site it would be castastrophic. I could picture hundreds of thousands of potential readers, desperate for another page of my prose, gnashing their teeth as they attempted to bring up my home page only to arrive at GoDaddy's "landing page".

But the fact is, mine is not a commercial site. It doesn't even have any ads on it. At any given time there might be 30 or 40 visitors to a specific page after I've posted a link to it on Facebook.

Then there's my OCD and the fact I had two overlapping domains, paulcilwa.com and cilwa.net. I had used the former for my site, and the latter for my email. I had also envisioned putting my kids' websites as subwebs beneath it. But none of my kids seemed to actually want to do that. So it was kind of a waste, and I had considered getting rid of one of them anyway, even before this.

Further complicating things was the fact that I was (and still am) in the process of converting this site to ASP.net (a newer website technology than the ASP Classic that previously ran it. I had hoped this conversion would take a week but it's been over 2 months at this point; and while navigating the site's contents works reliably, the special access pages (sorted by title or date or keyword, for example) are not yet functioning.

But…here we are, struggling to rise once again—that's me as well as my site—from the ashes of the old!