Something weird has happened. This blog disappeared in May 2021 and since then has been displaying a message saying that the version of PhP wasn’t compatible. I tried to follow the instructions for updating the version of PhP, and thought I’d done so, but nothing seemed to be happening, just the same message whenever anyone tried to link to this site.
I found by experiment that the Damson Tree and Phyllida Fogg blogs were still accessible, and so was the Southsea Storytellers, so I could have continued blogging if I’d wanted to, but it seemed like a good time to give up, and that’s what I did. I carried on writing a journal for a while, just something where I wrote (at first every day) but didn’t share it with anybody (or rather didn’t put it anywhere where other people could potentially read it even if they wanted to), but after a couple of months that just fizzled out too. I think I may have jotted down a couple of poems since then, but don’t really know what happened to them. I removed writing from my life as a hobby, as I’d been drifting towards for several years, and deleted ‘writer’ from the tagline on my FB profile, though I left in ‘poet’.
This morning I saw that I’d had an email from my hosting provider saying that I needed to update the PhP version on my whole site before the 9th February. I almost didn’t renew it when it came up in September, because I hadn’t done anything with the site in so long, but then I paid for another two years, almost out of inertia, and from a superstitious dread that if I didn’t, I’d regret it.
Anyway, I almost didn’t read the email, but having paid up in the autumn I thought I’d better. It also gave a link to how to do it, so I tried it, though it didn’t look any different from what I’d done before. But hey presto, suddenly I have my blog back…
Except that…
Now it appears that the Damson Tree blog isn’t working any more (but with a different error message). which means the ‘bookshop’ isn’t either.
Not that I have any plans of writing anything – or any expectations of selling any copies of my books.
PS: I had a brainwave and changed the php version on Damson-tree.co.uk back to the one it was before. Now all the blogs seem to be working. Go figure.