This past Friday, I celebrated the annual occurrence of Angela Breaks Her Blog when I realized that because I am an idiot, I didn't renew my domain name and hence it had been overtaken by a vile and probably very successful porn site. I would imagine that the moment that change took place, that URL instantly saw more traffic in one hour than it had seen in the previous year of its life. So, I wish it well, and have moved on to greener--or at least less morally corrupt--pastures.
In the general sense, I'm not terribly distraught by the situation. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I'm a little glad that this happened. It probably won't surprise too many of you to hear that I'd been seriously toying with the idea of throwing in the blogging towel. I recently read an interesting post about the death of a blogger, and will confess that a lot of the points mentioned hit very close to home. Almost all of the blogs that I was reading in the early years of this endeavor have fallen by the wayside or are only very infrequently updated. I've added some more wonderful blogs to my reading list over the past year and a half, but in the past few months I have been very unmotivated to invest the effort into finding new blogs to read and forming relationships with other bloggers like I did in years past.
I also managed to acquire a hateful little troll, hailing from the lovely city of Atlanta, Georgia according to a WHOIS search. A troll that felt entitled to peppering posts with nasty little comments and then becoming self-righteous and highly affronted each time I deleted one of her rude personal attacks without any response. Here's the thing commenters, if you're going to be horrid and hide behind a mask of anonymity, I have ZERO qualms about deleting and blocking your hideous little self. So, anyway, moral of the story, by changing my URL maybe I've managed to shake her, and if not, recent IP blocks seem to have taken care of the issue anyway.
All this to say, I was beginning to feel that maybe a blog just wasn't in the cards for me anymore, and that I would quietly close down operations without fanfare and slip into oblivion. Then my blog went kaput of its own volition, I felt a little relieved for a nanosecond, and then immediately thought of approximately fourteen things that I had been meaning to blog about and realized that no, I'm not ready to give this up quite yet.
So, here I am, all moved into my new digs. I'm sending out change of address cards, updating my address with the internet postal service, and hoping that everyone can come along for the ride. I'm still working through the standard move-in kinks--for example, why on earth have all of the photos in my posts vanished?? And why did my little favicon disappear?? That didn't happen the last time I changed URLs! But I think this was the shake up I needed to get back on track with the blogging world, and I'm looking forward to becoming a more active member of blogging society once more and kicking things up a notch around here!
