Those two or three of you who may be waiting with baited breath for the 3rd issue of Blog Tower, originally due out about now, have a right to be advised that it ain't gonna happen fo' a while. My webhost--or so it laughingly calls itself, apparently unaware that hosting entails some, you know, duties besides collecting the monthly fee--had a few little problems the last couple of weeks. First, it cut off access to several of my sites, posting a big FORBIDDEN notice if you tried to view them. Unsatisfied with that as lacking in severity, it then completely lost them for about a week. All of them. Finally, after frantic phone calls were exchanged, they found them again, but everything I had changed or added after Nov 15 has for some reason vanished and would appear to be gone for good. This includes, of course, all the work I did on Issue 03, which now no longer exists in any form.

This is depressing. I'm forced to start all over again from scratch. Meanwhile, Aardvark Monthly, the humor zine, and an as yet unnamed zine of original material from blog writers of note, are hovering in Limbo--should I put them together and risk losing all that work while my host attempts to get its act together?

Part of the problem here is that everybody is disavowing all knowledge of responsibility. Verizon says it's not their problem, it's Trellix, the site builder. But Trellix has been cut into four different pieces and none of them will admit to having responsibility for maintaining Verizon's webspaces. 'Site Technical Support' goes straight back to Verizon, who tell you they don't know what to tell you but 'They' have been having problems. Who is they? We don't know. What problems? We don't know. Well, who's fixing it? We don't know. Then who do I talk to about this? We don't know. They're very nice and very friendly but they don't know much.

They're still working on it, supposedly. I'm going to give them a couple more days and then if the rest of my work isn't restored, make a decision about where to go from here. I swear, if this wasn't the cheapest deal around ($7/month for 100mgs of space and unlimited bandwidth), I'd be looking for a replacement. The good news is that in the, what, 8 months or so I've been actively using their hosting, this is the first time anything like this has happened, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them.

Still, it's a bummer losing all that work.

Stay tuned for further developments. Otherwise, go on with what you were doing before I interrupted you.