In September of 2023 I took down brianna.org for the first time in (gasp) 25 years. And I left it down.
It wasn’t a premeditated act or anything other than the VPS I had hosted this site and my main business site on for many years had been acquired by a new host and the price bumped up absurdly and I thought well, I can just spin up a droplet on DigitalOcean where I do most of my friend-hosting and experimenting nowadays.
Then I realized my backup from the old host was mislabelled and I had lost about 500 posts.
Then I remembered my ancient external drive and found 497 of those posts.
Then Archive.org helped me restore the missing 3 posts and some of the images.
All of this to say, in between I used the downtime as an excuse to rebuild String Theory as a block theme, which was simple and pretty straightforward and almost no fun at all, and I built a test brianna.org Lunch Break theme with it and that also didn’t hit the old dopamine receptors like it used to. So I decided to put up the old stuff so Google remembers I exist, even the embarassing stuff about my feelings, old feelings. And that’s where we are today.
brianna.org is now hosted on the TechnoSiren.blog network where I host cool cats like Rae Mariz and Kathryn Pinker and is no longer costing me $75/mo so, hooray. Am I still experimenting on the web? You know it. Am I doing it at this domain? Not really. Consider this a historical, though living, document. Kind of like a Citroen whizzing around the Roman Colosseum.