This website may go temporarily offline in another week or month (it's not clear to me exactly when).
Why?
It's totally technical, actually.
I'm no longer paying for this blog's domain name and paid plan, so that means this website will go onto Weebly's free plan.
I'm not making money off the blog (plus we've reached the phase of marrying off children & all the accompanying blessing of expenses), so while it feels cool to have my very own dot-com domain name, and while Weebly makes things quite affordable, it still costs more money than I can afford — especially taking into account how Weebly is an American-based company working in dollars and I'm working with a low-income shekel-based society.
And, as usual, my filter and attempts to use Weebly's help function clash with each other.
I don't blame filters for this because as explained in a previous post, the Internet is a boundary-hating technology: www.myrtlerising.com/blog/hi-tech-hates-boundaries.
Anyway, all this means that when my domain & paid plan lapse, then the website automatically Unpublishes.
Or that might not happen. I don't know yet.
But if it happens, then how quickly this website pops back online depends on:
- whenever I notice my website has disappeared from online (if it's nighttime here in Eretz Yisrael or Shabbos or I'm dealing with a family simcha, then it might take me at least half a day to notice—or more)
- how fast I'm able to remedy the situation (like if I need to fix things via a long & frustrating phone call—or two!—and only during their official working hours, etc...then that takes longer)
When this website goes back online, it will most likely be with this domain name:
www.myrtlerising.weebly.com
(That's the free domain name for Weebly-users, which is what I am.)
I'll see if I can create a more-helpful-than-usual 404 redirect page, but who knows if I'll succeed?
Also, I don't know yet how the name-change affects RSS feeds or the Feedburner subscription. I'm sorry I'm really not competent with this hi-tech stuff, even the simpler aspects of it. And I apologize for any inconvenience or vexation.
So to sum up:
If this website suddenly disappears, that should be only temporary (though it might be hours or even days, depending) and will come back online again at this address:
www.myrtlerising.weebly.com
(Although you can always also try the present domain name www.myrtlerising.com to see if that works because, as well-known, a lot of this technological stuff tends to be capricious.)
When Doing Things "Wrong" Paradoxically Works
(Sometimes the number jumps up after a particularly quirky post with links to different websites that attract attention, like what happened with this one: www.myrtlerising.com/blog/the-original-magic-mirror-a-true-story-from-the-life-of-rav-chaim-ben-attar-the-ohr-chaim-hakadosh. Yet when visitors see it's too wacky for their taste, the readership drops back to normal. But this time now, it stayed up.)
This defies logic because I recently started posting so infrequently (and even those sporadic posts sometimes consisted of just links with no original content), and infrequent posting usually signals the death knell to any kind of online presence.
So part of me thought, "Ooh, I definitely don't want to disappear now when my readership is davka going up!"
Then I realized where this phenomenon and my thoughts were coming from (AKA, not the yetzer tov).
So that just goes to show how, despite logic & expert advice & trends, doing the opposite of what everyone recommends can still reap an unexpected & desirable result.
(Because our efforts are only that: efforts. Results depend on Someone Else...)
Final Re-Cap
- Readers instinctively skim reading online, so they miss information
And:
- Readers retain less when reading online than reading from a printed hardcopy
(Yeah, the two are interrelated.)
So if you wish to continue reading this blog even after it disappears, this is what you need to know:
If this website suddenly disappears, that should only be temporary (though it still might take hours or even days, depending) and will b'ezras Hashem come back online at this address:
www.myrtlerising.weebly.com
(Although you can always try the present domain name www.myrtlerising.com to see if that works because, as well-known, a lot of this technological stuff tends to be capricious.)