Friday, July 18, 2014

My what is for sale?

I allowed myself to get too busy to keep up this blog. Literally neglected the poor thing. Then one day I decided to join a new writer's site. I uploaded a picture for my profile, wrote a bio, and provided my blog's URL. Since I hadn't posted in my blog in months, I decided to pay my blog a visit. Lo and behold, a glaring page came up announcing my domain was for sale. Gasp!
It turned out I let my domain expire.
Thinking all I had to do was renew it, I expected my blog to come up all nice and pretty like it had always done. Not so. I ended up having to go through the steps outlined in Blogger to use my own domain name. I felt like I was reinventing the wheel. After getting through a few glitches with the web host where my domain is parked, my blog finally came up.
Fortunately, my life doesn't depend on my blog being active, so to have it down for a few weeks didn't break me. But there are bloggers out there whose lively-hood is centered around their online presence. I can only imagine how awful it would be for them to lose even a day.
Now that I'm back online with my blog, I'm doing the happy dance. Maybe now I won't take it for granted. The day will come when I might really need it to promote my writing, not to mention retaining ownership of my domain so potential readers can find me.
Word to the wise, don't ever allow your domain name (URL) expire.