Happy birthday to me(3dia).
Ten years ago today, I became me3dia. That’s when my blog went live, first on Blogger, then on Movable Type. When it launched, “me3dia” already existed in Google searches, but only as a typo for “media,” which is how I got me3dia in the first place. I kept accidentally hitting the 3 key along with the e, and I liked how it looked for two reasons: I had dreams of a career doing journalism, PR and advertising copywriting — three forms of media — and I also liked the 3D in there. Media with depth.
Today, me3dia.com is pretty quiet; most of my blogging is happening elsewhere. I blog here on tumblr, on Gapers Block (which launched in 2003, and on which I’ve posted well over 10,000 times), on Twitter and on client sites. (Ironically, my last remaining pro blogging gig just came to an end — though time will tell if I start another one.) My online activities are splintered and spread out, and it’s time to get them back in order.
Until this month’s Great Tumblr Out(r)age, I was contemplating moving my me3dia blog to Tumblr completely. It’s obviously much easier to deal with, and, until recently, fairly reliable. I might still do it.
A major factor in this is just how unreliable me3dia.com proper has become. Mentally, I blame this on Textpattern, the CMS I currently use, but it’s really not TXP’s fault. The trouble is my host.
I was a “venture capital” funder of Textdrive, a hosting company founded by Jason Hoffman and Dean Allen. As a “VC200,” my seed money guaranteed me hosting for life. That was a great deal for me, since I had modest needs for my hosting, and as a fan of Dean and of Textpattern, I was happy to pitch in and put up with other people on my server doing crazy things that caused it to crash. (Well, I was a little annoyed, but not terribly so.)
After a couple years, Textdrive merged with Joyent, and eventually Textdrive folks were asked to move to Joyent servers. I did so reluctantly — and tardily, finally using my “golden ticket” about a year after it was issued. Transfer went relatively smoothly, but something was amiss. The front page of me3dia would load just fine, but trying to get to individual entries would take ages, or fail altogether. A complaint to customer service did little to explain it, except that it seemed to be that I was using too much bandwidth — this despite getting almost no traffic. A spike of a couple hundred hits apparently brought it down. Which led me to the conclusion — since I didn’t get an answer from Joyent when I asked — that my hosting for life, which was a gig of space and unquantified-but-functionally-unlimited bandwidth & data transfer, was now something in the neighborhood of nothing.
Worst of all, the discovery of this serious problem with my hosting came at a time of loss, when I was using my blog as a means of expressing my emotions. I was already devastated, and here I was struggling to let people read my thoughts.
The incident was, in fact, one of the reasons I started using Tumblr. I was not blogging, basically shut up by the failure of technology.
So as a 10-year birthday present to my site, I’m going to move it to a more reliable host — most likely back to Omnis, who was my host when I launched the site; that’s where 1954 and a couple other things are currently hosted. I may switch yet again to another CMS (maybe it’s time for Wordpress?) and just leave my older archives frozen in time. But my goal for this year is to pull me3dia together and make it back into what it should have been all along: my home on the Internet.
Happy birthday, me3dia. Glad you’re still around.
