I’ve been feeling severe emotional pain on behalf of my fellow upstate New Yorker, blogger Kelly Sedinger, the overalls guy. And I’ll admit that it’s not just empathy, but a profound understanding of what he’s been going through.
He’s been posting as Forgotten Stars for about five years, and at Byzantium Shores for nearly two decades before that.
Then, inexplicably, all of his posts after April 21, 2026 disappeared. Apparently, during an earlier outage, something else went wonky. As of Sunday evening, he can post, BUT the pieces he wrote in the past month and a half are still MIA. And the formatting has been stripped.
At least the individual post links now load. And the comments now work; I LOVE comments, making them and receiving them.
Kelly wrote: “I’m not going to lie, folks, all of this has really sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for this notion of doing content creation…and it also has me questioning my whole strategy on that score, anyway.” It’s almost impossible for me to focus on writing when my site is down. I could technically write on a backup site, but it’s not the same.
Joy
There are those of us, like Kelly, who write for the joy of the sharing. And we spend some moolah keeping our junkie habit, I mean, our love of the written word alive. Friend Chuck Miller recently wrote, “I can tell you that, from personal experience, blog hosting does not operate for free. At least not GOOD blog hosting.”
I’ve been spending more than a few dinero on this enterprise, changing providers along the way.
Kelly has been spending his money too. “I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. “
I have some alleged redundancy/backup to this blog, if I understand what the heck all of those plugins are supposed to do. (Nope, I really don’t fully comprehend, and people explaining in tech-speak does NOT help.) My last problem was one plugin that was screwing up another plugin with a very similar name!
My blog was down for 23 minutes on both Saturday and Sunday nights, my Jetpack informed me. But it came back up on its own, or by magic.
So keep a good thought for Kelly Sedinger, who, if he’s anything like me, is emotionally exhausted by all of this.