It’s a long one, buckle in.
I started blogging at misszoot.com in early 2004. The date is not exact because I actually had been trying to start a blog for years – focusing on my obsession with television – in different places. But I think the version of this one…me just writing about everything with no specific topic…was in 2004.
I self-hosted it until 2020. This means I had my own hosting space on a server and I picked my own Content Management System to run it on. I started with Movable Type and then switched to WordPress. Over the course of those 17 years, I wrote about 6000 blog posts which is stupid and insane.
Sometime around 2018 or 2019 my two younger kids decided they didn’t love their poopy diaper stories all over the internet. They also didn’t love how much I talked about boobsweat. The compromise was that I draft all of their childhood stories but I was allowed to write about anything I wanted that related to me.
So, I threw a lot of those 6,000 entries into draft mode to start sorting through them and discovered something terrible: Erroneous links to random businesses all through my content.
It turns out, that a website like mine is great for cramming your link onto. It’s “respected” and it has frequent updates. So SEO companies figured out how to hack into vulnerable WordPress sites and just stick random links into the content that actually kinda made sense. Like…I’d be talking about how we needed a new roof and I wasn’t sure how we were going to afford it and there would be some mildly-clunky but not obvious sentence thrown in like: “My favorite roofing company is ABC Roofing in Oklahoma!” with a link to the business.
So, I did my best to increase security on my site and started cleaning them up. And then I discovered some time in 2020 that the LINKS WERE STILL POPPING UP IN NEW PLACES. Turns out? There’s a lot you have to do to keep WordPress safe and I couldn’t afford to pay for all of the tools/plugins etc. So, I decided until I could figure out what to do with 14 years of content and 6,000+ posts I needed to write elsewhere. So I did what everyone in 2020 did.
I have successfully moved all of my blog to WordPress.com so they can pay to keep it safe. But I have the smallest package so there’s not many bells and whistles. Oh, and during all of this chaos I did trash like half of my content. If you’re curious what I deleted and why, read this primer.
I’m still trying to clean the place up and I’ll be importing my substack stuff back over here slowly but surely. However, I don’t know how to get my substack subscribers over here so…that is tricky. But I’m in no hurry since this place is still such a mess. None of my old posts have photos with them, which sucks for you guys. But I do have the photos in Google Photos, and maybe some day I’ll work through adding them back in. But for now? I’m focusing on trashing old content I don’t need to keep up with and trying to hunt down all of the old erroneous links that the hackers left over the last few years.
Thanks for visiting. Some day maybe I can get rid of this page. Until then? I thank you for your patience.