Please Excuse The Mess
Hi Everyone,
If you’re reading this, I finally decided to put my blog back up.
If you’re reading this sometime shortly after May 31st, 2023, it means I’ve put the blog back up but it’s still got some fundamental issues that need sorting out.
So… I apologise in advance for the broken links, missing images, and the fact that over three hundred posts are missing.
What Happened To Jamie McSloy’s Blog?
Nearly three years ago, there was a vulnerability in an old theme that my blog was using. The exploit caused my site to redirect to some virus-laden site.
Now, the exploit was patched quickly on the part of the company whose theme had the error.
Lucky for some, not so much for me; in that time, to put it politely, the whole thing got hacked and I pulled it down. At the time, I’d been using WooCommerce on the main install, customers had logins with their details; I thought it better to wipe the whole thing and make sure nobody got in trouble.
Besides, I could just upload the back up and go again, right?
Well… wrong.
See, I had kept backups fairly diligently for just this circumstance. Unfortunately, my backup software was corrupted.
I’ll keep the details sparse, but I dealt with half a dozen tech teams; one deleted my email server accidentally, another told me there was absolutely nothing they could do and that the virus would come back even if I started a whole new site on a new server with a new webhost, (I was as confused as you are,) and basically, a series of calamities and errors meant that my website was bonked.
This was in addition to the fact that Covid was going on and I’d been running a successful physical product business, (and had invested a ton of time and money into starting another,) only to have supply lines be messed up, and in addition, I was entirely burned out on the consulting and freelance copywriting work I was doing.
So it went on the backburner.
Build Back Better
I love blogging and always intended to return to it. At numerous points, I even thought about just starting with a new, fresh blog.
However…
Through the course of three years, blogging has become not just old-fashioned but dinosaur-fashioned. Despite that, I’ve received emails and messages across social media.
- “Jamie… when’s the blog coming back?”
- “Jamie… can you send me [article] you wrote?”
- “Jamie, you’re incredibly handsome and smart, please marry my beautiful younger sister, (and by the way, could you tell me how to start copywriting too?)”
At the start, I got these on a daily basis. Now I still get them at least once a week. Such is the life of a rock star blogger I suppose.
Anyway, let me cut a long story short;
I got caught up in making a plan for a perfect blog project when the thing that brought everyone here in the first place was reading about my little experiments and thoughts and the whole chaotic nature of a guy who didn’t really know where he was going but at least he was going somewhere.
I made a promise to various people, my Mum included, that I’d stop talking about starting to write publicly again and actually do it.
And really, blogging is dead and done and there’s no putting anything back in Pandora’s Box and by agreeing to put this up again, I’m fighting against a tide of lame-SEO-ChatGPT articles that are about to proliferate the soon-to-be dead-internet.
So naturally, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The Issues
Secondly, I’ll be in the business of fixing this site. My latest possible backup was from around 2019, but it didn’t export all the data, so I’ll have to fix the dates, images and so on.
From 2019 onwards I’ve been copying and pasting from the original Word documents.
And finally, when I did a new install, the permalink system got buggered up so there are a lot of broken links.
A lot.
I’m about 300 articles short, but that’s mostly from the time I wrote while the blog was originally down. Those will be added in due course.
Other than that though, the original articles are, for the most part, now up. You just might have to run a search on the blog archive page.
And, no doubt there are more issues that I’ll find, but I promised I would have the blog up by June 1st, and once it’s up I’ve got to address the issues, so I’m about to hit publish.
A couple more things.
Going Forward
Alright, so here’s a list of things that I’ll be doing.
Firstly, I’m soft-launching The Vault as a means of getting my finger out and finishing all the stuff I’ve told you I’d do over the years. Finish it, get it done, let me be your guru, guide and teacher with the help of high-quality guides for a tiny monthly subscription. (If you were ever a subscriber to my physical newsletter, send me an email, DM or whatever method you might fancy – I promised you free entry and if you want it, you’ve got it.)
I’ll also be doing emails. Mostly daily, (as I have an autoresponder I’ll set up as soon as this post is done) and maybe more than once daily depending on if I have to broadcast something interesting.
Thirdly, since the last time I blogged, I have started an intellectual property licensing business, a publishing business and I have a secret LLM app that makes me my actual money. As long as I put in 3-4 hours a day on this “Day Job” I have plenty of time to write books under my own name. Updates will go here, as well as all the new insights I’ve acquired in the past three years of ups and downs.
Finally, I’ll be blogging as close to daily as I can. It’s not exactly Immediately High ROI from a money perspective, but I love it, and if I get my “we’re-very-important-now-Jamie” ego out of the way, writing this random little blog project was probably one of the best things for breaking my habits and forcing me to be better that I’ve ever done.
So, in short…
We’re back, but excuse the mess.