Casting Across went the online equivalent of belly up on Sunday morning. I came home from church to a handful of emails alerting me to the fact that my website was on the bank, drying in the sun and gasping. And sitting in front of a keyboard and screen completely detached from any physical switches that could be flipped to fix the problem, I felt powerless. So, pit in my stomach, I began clicking on “how to’s.” Each used more words I had never heard before with greater frequency than the last. I didn’t know so many acronyms for protocols for how the internet works existed.
Apparently, lines of code began writing themselves in what I can only assume was a dry run for some Terminator-style technopocalypse. “Then they came for the fly fishing websites,” one day we’ll say. Was it a malicious attack? Maybe. Certainly not anything directed at a mid-tier angling platform. There’s no crown jewels hidden in my hosting data. But people and the bots they create do mischief and tomfoolery just for the sake of it. More likely than Skynet or a hacker is the reality that I use a boatload of tools, plugins, and templates to make Casting Across hum along. Over the years, one won’t play nicely with the others and there’s a “file not found” or “critical error” fit.
Nearly ten years of writing, links all over the world wide web, and the gateway to my content on other platforms were all buried under hyphens, strings of numbers, and whatever the symbols < and > are.
But it had never been so dire. It had never been broken.
This was a legitimate concern. And, if it happens again, it will be a concern in the future. But this last week was a reminder that things like my writing, my material possessions, and even my lifelong passions all exist far down the priority list. Because this week my fifth son was born.
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