 Well, after what feels like an entire year’s worth of bad news for my blogging endeavours (See: having to take legal action against a copycat site, being relentlessly plagiarised by dozens of other websites, Google’s Panda update killing our traffic… I could go on), last night I finally got the boost I was so badly needing, with the news that my fashion blog, TheFashionPolice.net has been nominated for a Cosmo Blog Award in the Established Fashion Blog category.
I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear this. It was completely unexpected for me: I knew the Cosmo awards were taking place, of course, but having failed to even be nominated last year, I didn’t bother asking people to vote for TFP this year. I put out a couple of Tweets about Shoeperwoman, but I knew the competition would be fierce, so after that I pretty much forgot about it, and when people on Twitter started getting excited about the nominations announcement yesterday, I didn’t join in, because I knew – I just KNEW – that I wasn’t in with a chance. That’s the way this year has gone.
When I finally did click through to see the nominations, it confirmed exactly what I’d thought: I had no chance. The Established Fashion Blog category is full of some of the best bloggers in the UK: big names, who I fully expected to see there. And then, towards the bottom of the list… me. Wow. I am completely blown away. I know people always bang on about how “it’s an honour just to be nominated”, and I never really believe them, because I always just think, “yeah, yeah, you want to win”. To have been nominated alongside such fantastic bloggers, though, is absolutely amazing to me, and has really helped lift my spirits, at a time when I badly needed it, so if you were one of the people who nominated me than THANK YOU.
With all of that said, though… I would really like to win! So if you have a few spare seconds to vote for The Fashion Police, I would really, really appreciate it: all you have to do is click here to go to the Cosmo site (you’ll have to enter your email address to vote: sorry! Please don’t hate me!), go to the “Established Fashion Blog” site and vote for The Fashion Police. Then wait for good karma to come your way, which it surely will…
Terry has prepared this handy graphic to help you. Now that’s worth a vote on its own, surely?
My Dressember Day 3 post is coming soon, and so is a massive rant, just to warn you. In the meantime, here’s this week’s Friend Friday, which is on the subject of blogging, and knowing when to quit…
1. How many hours a week do you spend blogging? Has that number changed since you started blogging?
Probably anything up to ten hours per day, five days per week: sometimes more, occasionally less. To put that in perspective, though (and, er, make it seem a bit less like an unhealthy obsession), blogging is my job, so it’s not like I’m sitting in an office from 9-5 and THEN coming home and blogging for ten hours. Blogging is my 9-5, even although I don’t keep anything like those hours (Becoming a small business owner turned me into a workaholic, and trust me, that’s not a word I’d ever have associated with myself before…), and I have three blogs to update daily, not including this one. That’s not all writing time, of course – I’m also including the time I spend researching posts, managing the sites, taking photos, and all of the other background stuff that’s part and parcel of professional blogging. I try not to blog on the weekends, but I will always check-in on comments, stats, Twitter etc, which is technically “work”, even although it often doesn’t feel like it. The presence of an iPhone in my life, and my compulsion to constantly check my email etc on it means that blogging is never very far from my mind!
The hours I spend on it haven’t changed too much since I started: if anything, I’ve reduced the hours a little because back in the early days I would work seven days per week, with very little difference between weekends and week days. After a while, though, I realised that was a one-way ticket to Insanity Central, so these days I try to keep the weekends blog-free, and I’ve been making a bigger effort to take some time off in the evenings too. And I also have Fi and Caroline writing for one of the sites too, now, which has been a huge help.
2. There is always more you can do, write, read, comment on… how do you limit your time spent on these tasks?
I have quite a strict blogging routine, which I try to stick to: it involves writing as many of my weekly posts in advance as I can, leaving me the rest of the time to do all of the other stuff. Sounds good in theory, but in practice the actual content creation frequently eats up almost all of my time (I can never predict how long it’ll take me to find something I want to write about: some days it comes easy, other days it takes hours) and I end up sitting at my computer at midnight feeling like I haven’t done even half of the things I’d wanted to get done that day. I’m working on ideas to free up more time, though: hopefully by next year things will be a little easier…
3. Have you experienced Blogger burnout yet? How have you dealt with that?
Yup, frequently. The only way I know of to deal with it is to switch of the computer and walk away – and by that I mean far away. This is why I value my holidays so much: if I’m at home I find it really difficult to switch off, because the compulsion to check comments, check email, or write one more post is always there, and because I have an overly-developed guilt complex which means that I feel guilty if I’m at home but am not working. If I don’t have a handy vacation planned, a day-trip or something will also work: anything that gets me out of the house and away from the computer!
4. This time of the year is always a lot busier than any other time. Will your blogging change as a result?
Ha! Yes! Because I blog for a living, I don’t have the luxury of being able to just shut the blogs down when I’m not here (well, I can, but if I do, people yell at me, and I also don’t earn much money, so it’s not a great idea), so I have to write all of those posts in advance. It’s by far my least favourite part of the job, but the holidays are always worth it.
5. Could you forsee a moment in which you are not blogging anymore? How would you you identify that it’s time to walk away?
I actually decided to give up this blog earlier this year, and didn’t update for over a month. At the time, I felt that no one was really reading any more, and I started to question what the point was of putting so much of myself and my life online if no one was interested in hearing about it. When I made the decision to quit I was pretty sure it would be permanent, but as the weeks passed I started to miss it: something would happen, and I’d think, “Ooh, I must blog about that!” and then remember that nope, I wasn’t doing that any more… it was a strange feeling because I think blogging had become such an ingrained habit by then that it was hard to give it up. So I started up again in September, and I think the break did me some good, because I’ve been enjoying it much more since then. With that said, if it did reach the stage again where I felt like no one was reading, or if it started to have a negative impact on my life, then yes, I would walk away. People always tell you to write for yourself, but it’s actually really hard to do that online: you always have to be aware of the fact that you’re ultimately writing for an audience, and if that audience were to disappear, then I would take it as a sign that it was time to go back to a private journal.
With my other blogs, the idea of giving up is obviously more complex because I wouldn’t just be giving up a blog, I’d be giving up a job, and in order for me to be able to do that, I’d have to have some other form of income. At the moment, I can’t really imagine what that would be: I know I never want to go back to a “traditional” job, but I guess another business idea could tempt me away from blogging – I just don’t know what that idea might be yet!
For more Friend Friday answers, click here.
Tagged friend friday
So, yesterday morning I was sitting at my desk, working away when there was a knock on the door. It was the postman, and the postman was delivering one of those cards that say, “Oh, hey, we have a mystery package for you, but the person who sent it didn’t bother to pay the correct postage, so you’ll have to drive all the way to the sorting office, cough up the dough, and then find out what it is!”
(Aside: why do Royal Mail do this? I mean, why not just BRING ME THE FREAKING PARCEL, and allow me to pay for it right then and there, when I have the chance to, you know, LOOK AT IT and decide whether it’s something I want to pay money to receive? Wouldn’t that be easier than the postman coming to my door with a card (a waste of paper, and the earth’s precious natural resources!), then me getting into my car and driving to the sorting office (a waste of fuel! And time!) to ask ANOTHER member of Royal Mail staff (a waste of manpower!) to rummage through the mail, and find the parcel? It’s not like they’re not in the business of delivering mail ANYWAY, after all. It’s not like they’d have to sit scratching their heads for hours, thinking, “Oh my, how on earth will we accomplish the task of transporting this package to someone’s door?” Or, OK, given how much they struggle at this sometimes, maybe they would…)
Anyway, I got this card, and immediately I was torn. My natural curiosity, and, indeed, greed, made me desperate to know what was in the mystery package (What if Christian Louboutin had suddenly decided to just randomly start sending me shoes, like he did in that dream that one time?), but my natural laziness/stinginess made me reluctant to haul ass aaaaallll the way to the sorting office (I realise I’m making the sorting office sound like it’s in outer Siberia here. It’s actually just a few miles down the road, but, you know, lazy.), just in case the Mystery Package turned out to be something not worth paying £1.10 for. It was a difficult decision, but in the end, curiosity won out, so this afternoon I made the arduous journey and presented myself at the sorting office counter clutching a shiny £1 coin and a 10p piece which I’d stolen from Terry the day before.
The first clue that all was not as it should be came when, rather than disappearing into the other room and returning bent double under the weight of a hefty package, the Sorting Office Man simply reached under the counter and produced an envelope.
An envelope.
Can’t really fit shoes in an envelope, can you? “OK,” I thought doubtfully, “Maybe it’s just stuffed full of cash. Cash works for me too!” I stared at the envelope. It stared back at me, blankly. Once again, I was torn. It seemed unlikely that there was anything in there that I’d actually want to PAY to receive, but then again, you never know when opportunity’s going to come a-knocking, do you? Maybe the envelope contained notification that some wealthy, yet distant, relative had died, leaving me their entire fortune, plus a slightly creepy house in the middle of nowhere: a house with a CHILLING SECRET? Perhaps it was a letter from a publisher, saying, “We’ve read your blog and even although you only have five readers, we’re so impressed with the cunning way you weave tales about your teeth, that we want to turn it into a novel, which we will call TEETH: A Tale. Please sign the enclosed contract so we can transfer £1,000,000 into your account immediately for the exclusive rights.” Perhaps I just read too much chick lit?
With these thoughts racing through my mind, I slapped my £1.10 on the counter, and excitedly ripped open the envelope to find…
A PRESS RELEASE.
Yes, a PRESS RELEASE. You know, one of those could-totally-have-been-sent-by-email pieces of marketing designed to persuade me to write about someone’s product?
(Another aside: Why are people still sending press releases through the mail? Is it secretly 1994 again, and I just didn’t notice? Doesn’t it stand to reason that, as a blogger, I’m likely to be in possession of a computer and an internet connection, which would allow me to receive these things by email? Wouldn’t that be easier for everyone concerned? WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE TREES?)
So, we’ve now reached a stage where I am actually paying to receive press releases, apparently. And not only that, I’m driving across town to pick them up, too. Maybe I could actually start WRITING them for the companies concerned? And I could PAY THEM for the privilege? Then I could publish my own press releases on my sites, and, I dunno, maybe I could pay them again at that stage? Because that’s the only way I can imagine it being any MORE inconvenient for me to be marketed to.
In closing, I feel I have to add my usual disclaimer here: I know not all PR people do things like this. I’ve worked in PR myself, I know people make mistakes. Hell, I make mistakes every single day. Sometimes they involve setting things on fire.
But damn, I was disappointed it wasn’t shoes.
Tagged PR
I’ve been a bad blogger this week. Worse than usual, I mean. This time, though, I have a very slightly better excuse than usual. No, really, I do.
You see, at the end of May this year, I’m taking my annual, much-longed-for trip to The Happiest Place On Earth, a.k.a The Sunshine State, a.k.a Oh, Thank God We’re Back, a.k.a. Florida. So far, so exactly the same as every other year, hmm? This year, however, it will be slightly different, because this year we’re going for three weeks rather than two – a fact that has been the cause of great rejoicing in our house, and also the cause of great terror. Because… the business. It needs to keep functioning, even when I’m lying on a beach keeping an eye out for crustaceans, or having my fingers prised off another pair of Louboutins at Neiman Marcus. Previously, on “Oh Crap, How Am I Supposed To Keep My Business Running When I Am Not?” I have achieved this feat by writing all of the posts that would normally appear on the sites during my holiday in advance.
And it has damn near killed me.
This year? I just can’t. I can’t do it any more. Our holiday to the Canaries in December was the last straw. Once again, I worked myself into the ground in the run-up to the holiday, and once again, I spent a large percentage of my time on holiday worrying about how well the dozens of posts I’d been forced to write in a short period of time would go down. Every time I logged in to check the comments, my heart was in my mouth. Every time I got a negative reaction to a post, I started beating myself up for daring to take a holiday, when I should’ve just stayed at home and made sure there wasn’t even the slightest interruption to the sites. And then when I got home, I got an angry message from a reader who was so outraged by my absence from the internet that she had decided to never read my blogs again.
So I started 2010 feeling a bit down about it all, to tell the truth. I felt like no matter what I did, it would never be good enough. No one appeared to appreciate the effort I’d gone to to write advance posts for one blog, but when I DIDN’T bother to schedule posts for another, I got yelled at. It was a thankless task, and I’d pretty much decided that the only solution was to never take another holiday as long as I lived, when Terry stepped in as the voice of reason. He pointed out the fact that had been staring me in the face for a very long time: that the business has now reached the stage where I just can’t do it all on my own – or even with his help – and also, wow, chill the hell out woman, look, here is some wine!
Which is why, as of next week we’re starting to employ freelance writers for The Fashion Police.
(Note: It wasn’t because of the wine. Honestly.)
(Another Note: We’ve already hired the writers, so my apologies if the title of this post was misleading. Still, at least you don’t have to read any more of this long ramble, hey?)
This is a really, really exciting time for us. Bringing in other writers was always part of our long-term plan, but it was always something that felt like it was in the extreme long term (i.e. the I’ll-probably-be-dead-by-then long term), so finally being able to move forward with that is pretty amazing to me. Also, we have some really great writers on board (Take a bow Andrea, Caroline and Fi!) and more lined up for when we need them, so I’m also really excited to see what they’ll come up with.
It’s also kind of scary, in the way that change is always a bit scary. It means relinquishing a bit of the control I’ve had over MY BABY the site in question, and when you’re a control freak, that’s hard. But it’s also really cool, and I’m hoping it’ll be something that will help the business grow, and allow me to be able to take a break every now and then without being constantly glued to my iPhone and, um, running up £30 worth of calls (And by “calls” I mean “connecting to the internet to check my blogs, and also to find out if I really DO look like that girl on Coronation Street, like the mad woman who sat next to Terry on the plane said*”) before I’ve even left the airport at my destination. Which, yeah, is what happened when we went to Gran Canaria in December. Oh, how we laughed when Terry called O2 (my service provider) to tell them there’d been a “mistake” with the billing, and they explained that I’d downloaded a kazillionty-one megs of data WHILE I WAS WAITING FOR MY SUITCASE. Ahem.
Anyway! Onwards! And upwards! Does anyone know where Terry’s hidden my iPhone?
* I don’t, by the way. That woman was mad. She also kept leaning across Terry to poke me in the side and say, “Do you just read AAAALLL the time? Is that all you do?” To which I answered, “No, when I’m not reading I also enjoy eating old ladies who keep wanting to chat while I’m reading.” In my own head, natch.
Two questions from Formspring:
Would you ever go back to working as a journalist again or do you love being a blogger?
Do you love your job? It is so different from ‘normal’ jobs.
At least once a week, sometimes more, I dream that I’m back at my old job. At first I’m confused. Why am I there? When can I go home? (Which is pretty much how I used to feel in REAL LIFE when I arrived at work, now I come to think of it.) I’m smiling and nodding at people, and all the time I’m thinking, “OK, this is weird. I’ll just stay for an hour or so, and then I’ll make my excuses and leave.” But the thing is, I can never leave. Because I’m working in the Hotel California. No, I’m joking: it’s definitely my old job. The “never leaving” bit is true, though, because as the day goes on, I suddenly remember that when I left that job, I did so on the understanding that one day I would come back for good: and clearly that day has come.
(This dream is obviously connected to the one in which I suddenly “remember” that I didn’t actually sit any exams at either university or high school, I was just somehow allowed to graduate, on the understanding that one day I would return to take the exams. The dream always begins with me realising that tomorrow I have to take a three-hour mathematics exam, having not studied maths, or, indeed, even THOUGHT about it, since I was a teenager. I’m actually breaking out into a cold sweat just thinking about this. I wish there was a way to divorce your subconscious mind. Why can I not have dreams in which I suddenly remember I’m a millionaire?)
“Amber,” I tell myself, “You’re an idiot. You could be at home right now, getting up when you want, drinking a million cups of coffee, pootling around in your dressing gown, getting paid to look at shoes on the Internet… And instead you’re here, and now that you’re here, you’ll have to keep on being here, getting up at 6am every morning, clocking in, clocking out, doing what you’re told to do rather than what you WANT to do… IDIOT.”
And then I wake up, and I AM at home, and I DO get to get up when I want, and pootle around in my dressing gown, and run my day anyway I like, and as much as I hate those dreams, I’m always kind of grateful for them, too, because they remind me how lucky I am. And trust me, I am lucky. I genuinely do love my job, and those are not words I ever thought I would type. I never expected to enjoy work. I always viewed it as something I just had to get through somehow, and while I knew there were people out there who claimed to love their jobs, I’m going to be honest: I thought those people were crazy. Or liars. Or crazy liars.
I mean, blogging was my hobby. As was, um, shopping. I used to sit at my desk and daydream about shoes one day being able to to turn a hobby into a job, but I didn’t actually expect it to happen, so when it did I spent years – literally YEARS – worrying that it would all be taken away from me, and I’d have to go back to a “normal” job again. You wouldn’t have to be Freud to work out the meaning of my recurring nightmare, hmm? I still do worry about it, actually, because I know for sure that I never want to go back. Not ever. I actually don’t think I COULD go back, even I wanted to: I’m too used to being my own boss, and working at my own pace, and not ever answering the phone to be able to adjust to the restrictions of the workplace again. Also, I’ve slowly started to phase “mornings” and “phonecalls” out of my life, and I don’t think many employers would appreciate that.
So, no, I wouldn’t want to go to back to a “normal” job, and I can honestly say that I’ve never been tempted by the thought, not even for a second. Even when we’d just started the business, and were working round the clock to build it up and make a living from it, I didn’t ever think “You know what, I could just get a job.” I would just much rather work for myself than for someone else (even if it meant earning less money), and blogging could almost have been tailor-made for me in that it’s something I can do for myself, from home, and without having to worry about clients, and meetings and all of the other stuff that comes with so many jobs.
With all of that said, I feel I should probably add here that it IS still work. Sure, it’s work that I enjoy (for the most part), but there’s a very big difference between blogging for fun and blogging for a living, so while I think it’s about as perfect a job as I could ever hope to find, it’s not without its stresses and irritations, and some days I find myself wanting to tear my hair out in frustration, just like any other job. I think anything you HAVE to do every day can sometimes feel like a chore, and although the good points of my job outweigh the bad ones by a country mile, I still look forward to the weekend, when I don’t have to think about it for a couple of days. I think what I’m trying to say here is that while the things I write about are frivolous, and I get to write about them from the comfort of my own home, I AM still running a business, and trying to make a living, so obviously it’s not all fun.
It IS a lot of fun, though…
p.s. Some more questions have been answered here.
A question from Formspring:
Do you ever feel that your business is more difficult not living in London?
Other than “I am not a shop”, the phrase I use most often on a day-to-day basis is “I do not live in London”.
OK, actually it’s not: the phrase I use MOST often is, “Rubin, get out of the bathroom and stop licking the toilet seat!” But “I do not live in London,” is definitely in high rotation, and that’s because every week I get dozens of invitations to events in London, all sent by well-meaning people (most of whom work in public relations) who are absolutely astonished to learn that I don’t actually live in The City That Is the Centre of the World.
I’ve never really understood this. Sure, if I was running a magazine, say, I could understand the assumption that I must be based in London: most of the traditional media in this country IS based in London, after all. The whole point of blogging, though, is that it’s completely democratic: pretty much anyone, anywhere, can set up a blog, even those of us living ”all the way up there in Scotland!” Does a non-London location make it harder to make a living out of blogging, though? Hmmm.
I think there are two ways of looking at this one. Personally, no, I don’t find that my location makes it more difficult to run my blogging business. What I don’t know is how much easier it would be if I WAS based in London. Undoubtedly, it would make a difference: I’d be able to accept all of those invitations, for one thing, which would possibly open the door to opportunities I just don’t know about right now. I’d be able to “network”. To “make connections” with people who could perhaps help my business in a variety of different ways. I’d be able to attend all of the press days and launches and fashion shows and oh, all kinds of other things. Here’s the thing, though:
I don’t want to.
It’s nothing personal, London. You’re a fascinating city, and I love to visit you from time to time. But the whole “attending events/networking/making important business connections” thing? It’s not for me. I know that will seem really strange to a lot of people, but the truth is, I’m a bit of a homebody at heart. I’m neither a mover nor a shaker, and the phrase “working the room” is enough to send chills down my spine. I’m shy. I’m a bit socially inept. I don’t enjoy making smalltalk with strangers, being schmoozed by PRs or answering the question, “So, what do you do?” over and over again. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things: they’re just not for me, and when I set up this business, I didn’t do it because I wanted to be a super-busy career woman, because I had long-since realised the error of that particular “ambition”. I did it so that I could hopefully make a reasonably good living doing something I enjoyed. Turns out that what I enjoy most is just writing, and being free to do that all day, without all of the associated other things that would be expected of me if I didn’t have my handy, “Whoops, I’d love to come to your [insert event here], but I can’t because I don’t live in London,” excuse at the ready.
Yeah, I’m pretty anti-social.
I’m not totally convinced that living somewhere else would make that much of a difference anyway, though. Sometimes, for instance, I think that being a bit of an outsider (which is what inevitably happens when you’re based a few hundred miles away from most of the rest of your industry) isn’t necessarily a bad thing for my blogs. It gives me a certain degree of freedom in terms of what I write, and how I write it, and I like that. I also like the lifestyle it allows me to have: I’ve spent a lot of time working in stressful jobs which made me utterly miserable, and now I really value the slower pace of life I get from not being right at the very centre of things all the time. The only people who have expectations of me are my readers, and that’s no bad thing.
I wouldn’t change things, is what I think I’m trying to say here, although I WOULD change my location if I could. Just not to London…
P.S. If you want to ask a question, either leave it in the comments, type it into the box in the sidebar, or visit Formspring here.
I know the image above is actually pretty hilarious given that I recently went out in public wearing two different boots, but allow me to bask for a moment in the reflected glory of The Fashion Police, which has just been named the winner of the fashion category in The Appletiser Blog Awards! Let’s just hope they never read Forever Amber, eh?
This is the second award the site has won, and both were the result of a public vote, which is particularly flattering, so if you were one of the people who voted for it, thank you: you helped make my day, week and month!
Tagged the fashion police
You know how in the aftermath of Black Friday, I was all, “WAH! Advance posts deleted! Can’t go on holiday! Life over!”?
Mercifully, it turned out not to be true:
Those are the Maspalomas sand dunes in Gran Canaria. The two little people you can see? That’ll be me and Terry, in the two weeks right before Christmas, although we’ll hopefully be walking in the same direction as each other.
It’s not the holiday we’d been planning. Before the Week from Hell (probably known to the rest of you simply as “last week”) hit, we’d had all kinds of ambitious plans involving long-haul flights and multiple connections, and me magically turning into the kind of person who doesn’t hate flying with every atom of her being.
I know! What the hell were we thinking?
But then Heart Internet deleted all of the advance posts I’d written in preparation for this mythical holiday. And Terry’s car decided it had just taken its last ever trip – destination: the side of the motorway. Suddenly, all was lost. But not really! Because, dashing to the rescue came Erin and Fi and Sian and Gemma, and all of the other wonderful people who either sent me guest posts for The Fashion Police or otherwise helped keep me sane. Thanks to them, plus hours and hours of work on the part of Terry and I, we managed to get everything back on track. We have matchsticks propping open our eyes and my fingertips have been worn down to little stumps with all the typing, but we did it. And if anyone ever tries to tell you the Internet is a cold and heartless place, full of perverts and weirdos, I will tell you… well, actually, I’ll tell you you’re totally right about that, I mean SERIOUSLY, you should see my spam folder some days. But as well as those people, there are also some absolute GEMS, and I’m very, very lucky to know so many of them. Aww, group hug, you guys!
Ahem. Anyway…
The car is still screwed (special, mechanical term for you there) which means we’ve had to revise our expectations a little, and go for a short-haul, no frills kinda break, but at this point we’re just so grateful to be able to go anywhere AT ALL that we’re not complaining. We’ve actually been to Gran Canaria before, years ago, and enjoyed it, and as long as I don’t get the flu again, like I did on our last winter holiday, I’m sure we’ll have tons o’ fun.
Conclusion: I like this week much more than I liked last week. MUCH more.
Tagged gran canaria, heart internet, holidays
If you’re a regular reader of any of my websites, you’ve probably already noticed that all of the sites have been down for most of today.
You’ve probably also noticed that, as of the time of writing (8pm, Friday), although most of the sites are now back up, they’re all displaying posts from September, with over a month’s worth of content missing.
This is because, at about 2pm today, our web hosts, Heart Internet, called us to say that while they were working on our server (our sites are huge and take up a lot of space, so we have our own server with them), they had somehow managed to irretrievably lose all of the sites. As in, they were gone forever, with no way of restoring them.
Our server was mirrored – there were two discs, each containing the same information. They had both suffered the same catastrophic event (we still don’t know what that was, exactly), and the data on both of them was lost. Forever.
Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, they told us they had lost this site, The Fashion Police (over 600,000 page impressions per month), Hey, Dollface! (around 90,000 per month) and Shoeperwoman (70,000 page impressions per month), PLUS all of the websites Terry has designed and hosts for our clients. Gone. All gone.
I realise a lot of people don’t take blogging seriously, or understand how someone can make a living from it, but the fact is: we do. Those sites are my livelihood. They are my full-time job. They’re what pays our mortgage, and all of our other bills. They are three years’ worth of 12-hour work days, blood, sweat and tears.
And now I was being told that they were gone for good. My whole livelihood, wiped out in the time it took me to eat lunch. ( And, OK, to watch Neighbours.)
To answer the question I know everyone will ask: YES, WE HAVE BACKUPS. Obviously, given the importance of these sites to us, they are backed up. Even with back-ups though, it would’ve taken us a long time to restore the sites to the way they were. During that time, we would be losing money: we started losing money as soon as the sites went down, and will continue to lose money until they’re fully restored. This is not a few pennies we’re talking about: it’s our livelihood. As it is, we’re going to have to manually restore the last month’s worth of posts to all of the sites, and all of the advance posts I had been writing for my holiday in December are probably gone for good. Which means no holiday in December, clearly.
You can only imagine the day Terry and I have had.
With Heart Internet absolutely insistent that there was nothing they could do to restore the sites, I did the only thing I could think of in my panicked state: I started venting on Twitter. Naturally, Heart Internet didn’t like that much. In one of the many conversations we had with them this afternoon, they asked Terry to tell me to stop tweeting about them, “to allow them to concentrate on fixing the problem.” Obviously this begs the question: what had they been concentrating on BEFORE that? Naively, we’d assumed they were concentrating on restoring the data from our ruined server. The only inference I can really take from “stop tweeting so we can concentrate”, though, is that they were actually concentrating on… Twitter.
I did not stop tweeting. I WILL not stop tweeting, or blogging, or speaking freely about the things that happen to me, because that is my right. I understand that it wasn’t pleasant for Heart Internet to read the hundreds of re-tweets and comments about them. But the fact is, it’s not my job to protect Heart Internet from criticism by keeping quiet about something that was going to have such a huge impact on my business and life. I related what was happening, as it happened, and I got a huge amount of support and advice from the people who follow me (and many who I’d never even heard of until today) – and that was a huge help to me, so thank you to those people.
Obviously, given that the sites are now (mostly) back up and running, albeit with posts missing, it turned out that Heart Internet WERE able to restore the data after all. Why did they call us at 2pm today, then, and say they were all gone forever, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it? I’d love to know.
I will be writing more about this (um, probably much, much more) once the dust has settled and I know exactly what has happened. For now, our priority is to get the sites back to normal, so it looks like we have a long, hard slog ahead of us.
And I never did find out what happened at the end of Neighbours…
[Edited to Add: as the older posts are restored to the site, they initially won't have comments and the images will show as red X's. Don't worry, we are aware of this, it's just going to take a while to fix, unfortunately]
Tagged heart internet, Pro-Blogging, really bad things
Well, here we are at the start of another month, folks. Can you believe it’s December already?!
Oh no, wait: it’s not December, is it? It just feels like it’s December, because last night I started doing December’s work – in addition to October’s, obviously. Yes, I am currently writing blog posts for December, and if you need me to explain how utterly depressing that is, I refer you to … oh, any post I’ve ever written here during the winter, in which I complain about how much I hate the winter. So, all of them, basically.
The reason for all of this writing-in-advance, mind you, is a little less depressing, and revolves around the fact that we’re hoping to take a holiday sometime in December, and go somewhere hot (NOT AUSTRALIA), or at least “warmer than here”. (STILL NOT AUSTRALIA). In order to do this, and take time off work, though, I need to either:
a) Clone myself
b) Do all of the work in advance
Terry tells me he will leave and never return if I try to clone myself, because one of me is more than enough, thanks very much, so that basically leaves me with option B. It’s not a great option, it has to be said. Mostly because I’ve been struggling a bit with my workload as it is lately, so the thought of having to write an entire two week’s worth of blog posts on top of what I’m already doing is… well. Is it too early to start drinking, do you think? Oh, and I have to start now, because I try to do it a little bit at a time (like, one extra post per day) rather than all at the same time, which just isn’t possible without making myself ill/insane.
Such is the burden of the self-employed writer, though, and as much as I hate to complain about my job (not really), it’s at this time every year that I sometimes find myself wishing I had a normal job, with normal working hours, and someone to cover for me if I’m ever sick, or on holiday, or just fancy lolling around all day watching 90210 and Gossip Girl. That feeling only lasts a few seconds, mind you, because this is literally the ONLY downside I can think of to self-employment, and the many, many positive things about working for myself more than make up for it. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.
Also, and I know everyone says this, but the passage of time is really freaking me out. I mean REALLY freaking me out. Seriously: it’s October now? Really? Did we not just DO this? In a few weeks it’ll be Halloween, and I could swear it’s only been a couple of months at most since LAST Halloween. And the whole “planning the winter holiday” thing? Just did that. Just a few weeks ago, I’m sure of it. Cannot POSSIBLY be time to do it again. No way. Not unless someone has been messing with the time-space continuum or something. Has someone been doing that? Maybe Rubin?
I’m scared to go to sleep now in case I wake up and I’m 90. Which, at the rate time is passing right now, will probably be next week.
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