Well, that was unpleasant!
As this site has grown in pagerank, it’s become the victim of ever-more sustained hack and spam attacks. The latest round was bungled, it simply took me offline rather than silently harvest my mojo for nefarious purposes. It’s clear that at some point I am going to have to pony up several hundred dollars a year at sucuri.net or equivalent and pay for monitoring and cleanup as this is just too time-consuming to keep doing myself.
It’s not as easy to keep a blog running on your own host as it used to be. Astro hasn’t posted in two years, for example, and is sorely missed. I’ve got a paypal button on the site like everyone else but that’s not any kind of solution, increasingly being self-hosted is going to become a perk of the privileged who can afford it, whereas the everyday bloke who wants a soapbox will have to gravitate towards a free platform like wordpress.com – which is an easy target for censors.
It’s not like I have anything profound to say, really, but I see this platform as a luxury, and I am keenly aware of just how ephemeral it is. That said, I’ll keep plugging away as long as I can 🙂 So, I’m back – what did I miss?
(ah, Pete has reviewed my review of fractale! And, I think he did a better job on this than I would have. And, given his praise, he will be disappointed in me when I profess my love of Robotech over SDF: Macross.)
Welcome back. I miss Astro, too, and I was hoping that we hadn’t lost you as well.
Ditto and ditto. Another big loss was Lawson, who I did not know as much as Astro, but he was more widely known, and accumulated a lot of material.
I often wonder if the distributed model of the [insert niche]-sphere is a good one. There are so many inefficiencies in the system – we all maintain high overhead separately, then surf around to each others’ sites/feeds to consume each others’ content and link to each other. Even a umbrella host like animeblogger doesnt really solve the problem of lots of small silos. The only solution I see would be to do a group blog hosted somewhere rock solid (like wpengine.com) with ads to support the hosting costs. But most of us – myself included – instinctually shy away from the (illusion of?) control over our own content that this would imply.
Most long-running successful blogs are group blogs. Consolidation may be inevitable. But we lose a lot of voices along the way.