In that last post, I wrote that Mike Johnston is "unfortunately" writing at Patreon now, so I thought I'd explain.
I'm a longtime reader of The Online Photographer, which is—in its own words—"one of the OG photography enthusiast websites on all the Internet, now an heroic survivor from all the way back in the last years of film and the early years of the digital transition." I've linked to Johnston's writing many times in the past. The "unfortunately" comes courtesy of Typepad, which closed down at the end of last month. It did so with very short notice, leaving its customers high and dry. Johnston, writing at TOP in the lead up to the closure:
"On August 27th, Typepad, our home of 17 years, announced it would be closing on September 30th. Pretty tight window already. But then, Typepad's servers evidently crashed yesterday (Thursday) afternoon a little before 5 p.m. Eastern."
Johnston is a fine reviewer of camera gear and technique, but he's not a computer tech kind of person, and moving the site in that amount of time was too big a lift. He's said that he's working on a new version of the site, but is now continuing his writing at Patreon.
To make the whole situation even more unfortunate, TOP was published on a Typepad domain, which is now gone, so there's no good way to redirect those readers who might not have been paying attention to the whole thing prior to it going offline. And all those links from over the years to his writing are now broken.
This is just another unfortunate—there's that word again—example of why everyone should own their own domain and host their own writing and photography. You just can never count on any service to be there as long as you want it to be.
I wish him luck, and will continue to support his Patreon as well as follow him to wherever his new home is.
