Where are you going, where have you been?

You may have noticed, a week ago, this blog — this entire website — disappeared. Or maybe you didn’t notice. Only one person got in touch to ask me about it, so maybe you don’t visit the site all that often, or you just thought it was a blog re-design gone a little haywire. It certainly was aggravating and unexpected for me, happening at just the wrong time last Friday morning. Regardless of whether anybody else noticed, this site did disappear, and was gone for several days in fact, when the domain name expired and was yanked out from under it.

I was at the office on Friday when I first noticed the problem, and then discovered — to my horror and chagrin — that I had indeed let the domain expire. Unfortunately, Network Solutions, with whom it was (and still is) registered, had my name on the account but did not have me listed as the primary administrative contact. They had Dreamhost, my hosting provider, for reasons that are still not entirely clear…and they had an out-of-work telephone number so couldn’t reach Dreamhost if they wanted to.

This, of course, all went down on Friday, when I had at best a couple of hours to deal with the situation. (While at the same time dealing with actual work, which has done anything but decrease as we rush to the end of the calendar year.) Last Friday, we took a group photo for our holiday greeting card, and then we left the office directly after that, a little after noon, to head downtown for our annual group lunch. Right after that, a little further downtown, we had our office holiday party. So, really, from the minute I left the office I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to resolve the
problem until the following Monday.

And I proceeded to get rather drunk at the holiday party, so I wasn’t in any shape to do anything about it then anyway. I wasn’t falling over or blacking out — I remember everything that happened, and I didn’t make a fool of myself or even wake up the next day with a hangover. But, for me, I drank a lot, more than I probably ever have in the past. I’m not much of a drinker, and really only a social one, and I genuinely didn’t like being that drunk. Again, I didn’t do anything embarrassing or dangerous — I just hung out with co-workers, then staggered home — but I really hadn’t been looking to get wasted.

Luckily, before all that, I was able to figure out with Network Solutions over the phone more or less what I needed to do, in order to get myself listed as the primary contact and thus be able to renew the domain name. It’s kind of a ridiculous process, actually, in which you fax or scan and e-mail a form to them saying, yep, I’m the primary contact, please change your records and let me do what I want with this site. The primary security measure seems to be that you print the form first on some kind of letterhead. Which, as I think anybody who’s ever used Microsoft Word for even half a minute will attest, isn’t a security measure of any real value. It’s basically saying, “This is legitimate because it came to us on pretty paper.”

You do have to provide identification, of course, like a scanned driver’s license and a paid utility bill, and while processing the change they do contact the current name in their records in case that person or company wants to challenge it. But it’s all a little ridiculous…even more so when I had to re-send the form because my name on it had to match my driver’s license exactly…and New York State just lists my last name and initials.

But, whatever. It’s finished now. Network Solutions temporarily restored the domain earlier in the week, and then by yesterday morning I was able to renew it, having been reinstated as the primary contact. (I went with the twenty-year renewal, by the way. I don’t know if we’ll even still have the internet by then, or if the zombie apocalypse will have finally happened, but that’s a problem for future Fred.) And I have to say, despite the ridiculousness of it, and the aggravation, Network Solutions was really quite helpful all along the way. (Well, except for the one guy who just repeated his name three times and then hung up on me.) Meanwhile, Dreamhost…well, I get their position — they really don’t have anything to do with the registration, and it was all in error. But they weren’t at all willing to work with me to clear up that fact with Network Solutions. Over the weekend, when I still wasn’t sure if I could clear it up, when I thought I might lose the site, or have to wait weeks for it to back into the domain pool where I could maybe pick it up again, that kind of ticked me off.

But again, it’s over now. I probably could have posted before now, and for a while I was feeling a little disconnected from my life by not being able to comment on it, not being able to blog. But it was also nice to take a short break from it.

I’m on an extended break from work now, off for the next sixteen days thanks to some accumulated vacation days and strategic placement of Christmas and New Year’s. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve got some stuff to do, for Christmas and for Kaleidotrope — launching again in January — but I’m looking forward to the time off.

Now as long as my domain doesn’t disappear out from under me again…