Dear readers,
We are in the process of migrating our 13 years of blog content to a new webhost. Unfortunately, my current webhost has locked my domain and is unresponsive to my inquiries. I have pursued the appropriate steps to take it back into my control, but it could take awhile – up to 60 days.
In the meantime, we have set up the site under the domain www.lesbianpgh.com (see what we did there?) with every speck of content. And if you do visit the original URL, you will be forwarded.
It is a humbling lesson to realize a man can strangle your entire identity by clicking a checkbox to lock your URL. I appreciate that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but I am angry and frustrated that someone would throttle our work here. And for no clear cut reason other than perhaps because they can.
What is most upsetting is the fact that we have important, time-sensitive projects going on NOW that require access to the blog. The struggle does not wait for domain turf wars to resolve themselves. We are working to (still) resist Chick-fil-A, to solicit holiday donations for LGBTQ neighbors, to honor the Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20, and more.
This makes it clear that in addition to everything else we are doing, we have to build up our webhosting and archiving resources. That feels so overwhelming. But I’ve spoken with an attorney and have learned that I can establish and finance a trust to ensure that this historical documentation of LGBTQ Pittsburgh will be preserved. That is in addition to #AMPLIFY.
Think of how many sites have been lost to the ages because the domain wasn’t renewed. We can’t ever recapture that history, especially if the URL is valuable and bought by a company that wants the traffic. And we may or may not have the original data. Pittsburgh Cue is gone. Pittsburgh’s OUT is gone. Numerous incarnations of the GLCC website are gone. Same with the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force. League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. Wilderness Women.
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I don’t want that to happen to us. This blog is embedded in my identity, but it is also bigger than me – it includes the contributers, the commenters, the Q&A participants, and the readers. So many people invest in this slice of LGBTQ life.
Your financial support allows us to continue blogging and managing projects like #AMPLIFY. We laid our situation our in this blog post. And updated it again here.
We will work out the navigation issues thanks to our crack team of webgurus who are donating their time to fix this problem – because they believe in this resource. And I’ll post soon with an update. If you need anything or have questions, please email pghlesbian at gmail dot com.
Sue
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