It's funny how, even when you been out of school as long as I have, September is always a time of new beginnings. Whether it's the start of a new fiscal year or a new solar year, like it is for me, since my birthday is in late August, or just that natural sense of renewal that comes with the beginning of each new season. This year, I'm celebrating another kind of new beginning with a brand new web site, hosted on Squarespace.

Looking back, it's hard to believe I've been blogging for more than 20 years. My first website, mspink.com, launched in March 2001, and was hosted on the server of a friend of a friend, who I had worked with at a small internet startup in Gastown until the dotcom bust unceremoniously folded the business, ejecting me and my colleagues on a Tuesday morning when they ran out of money to pay us. My friend's friend hosted my site for several years free of charge because it wasn't generating any revenue but, as he put it, it was generating beauty, which there wasn't enough of in the world, and he thought that was valuable enough to waive his nominal hosting fee.

I stayed on his server for free until the mid-2010s, when I started podcasting and storing large audio files, meaning a larger footprint on his server. I got into the habit of paying him a lump sum every once in a while, since he still refused to charge me a set fee, but I was making more money, and his server costs had increased. Once in a while he would ask me for a "donation" and I would eTransfer $100 or so. One day I noticed my site was down, which once in a while meant he was upgrading his equipment and sometimes meant it was time to send another donation. It hadn't been that long since my last payment, so I wrote to him asking if everything was okay. I got no response, which was kind of unusual. He was up at all hours and usually replied within a day at most. After a few days, I started digging around for his phone number. He had moved to the US a few years earlier and we had always communicated via email. After some investigation online, I finally found a phone number and left a voice mail and got a call back the next day from his mother, who told me that he had passed away in his apartment. She only found out when a couple of other people whose websites went offline had reached out to her. His servers shut down when the electricity in his place was turned off because the bill hadn't been paid.

After we hung up I felt a pang of emptiness. It had been almost a decade since we saw each other and our conversations over the years had been limited to server-related emails and pleasantries, but it was awful to think of him dying alone in an apartment in another country, with his friends and family far enough away, that weeks could go by without anyone knowing what had happened. I texted our mutual friend on Facebook, the only place where we were still connected, and asked him to call me as soon as possible, correctly assuming that he didn't know yet. They had been roommates and business partners once, but they had lost touch over the years. My friend was grateful for the news and we talked for a while about the old days and our lives since the dotcom bust that scattered our former circle of friends to far corners of the digital world.

After that I did some research and found nearlyfreespeech.net, an interesting little company that offers (as the name suggests) nearly free web hosting, assuming you're willing to do a little more work to put your site together. My original site, mspink.com, is still hosted with them and barely costs me $25 a year. When I started doing the Axis Astrology podcast with Allison Price back in 2013, we shopped around for the cheapest hosting we could find and, to save money, I created a WordPress site on nearlyfreespeech, which at the time meant doing a great deal of background labor to set up, including some database programming, which frankly I would never attempt now! Let's just say I spent an entire weekend locked in my home office sweating and swearing and cursing my foolish bravado until I finally emerged triumphant. The things we do to save money!

A decade later, my time and sanity are worth a lot more to me than they were back then, and my desire to suffer for geek bragging rights (whatever that's worth) has dwindled considerably… although it looks like I’m still bragging about it right now lol. Over the years, my blogging became more and more infrequent until I was posting almost nothing except a year-end wrap up every December, which I called my "List of Lists." It was as the name suggests an exhaustive list of all the books I'd read, favorite TV shows and movies, video games, YouTube videos, articles, memes and photos from the world of politics and entertainment. Sometimes it included impassioned rants about issues like gun control and the opioid crisis, TV shows I loved like "The Walking Dead," "Hannibal," "Legion" and "Game of Thrones" or shows I was hate-watching, like "Scandal" and "13 Reasons Why." The last time I posted was December 2020, with my top ten lists about the worst year ever, and then I took a break from blogging for a while because I didn't have as much to say… and because I was busy doing things like roller skating, making friends and getting some much-needed exercise outside for a change.

After Alison Price and I began podcasting together again in 2023 (you can listen and subscribe at Starzology.com), I finally took her advice… wait, that’s not quite right. "Advice" is what you call it when your Virgo friend tells you, it would be great if you started blogging again, you have so much to say and you're so talented at writing, but I know you're busy, so I guess it’s understandable... You’ll do it when you’re ready. It's a little different when your Leo friend, who also has a full-time job and four kids and still finds the time and energy to publish a weekly blog, run an astrology counseling business, create and sell her artwork and self-publish multiple books, host a YouTube channel with thousands of videos and her own podcast tells you, you should really start blogging again...

But I digress! I started up again in January 2024, opting to purchase the domain mspink.net, so I could keep my archived mspink.com site alive as well. It’s so old school it’s not even on a hosting platform like Wix or Squarespace or even Wordpress. I created it using Dreamweaver and bonus points to anyone reading who knows what the hell that is.

Maybe it's a weird choice to keep them both, but when I initially switched my domain over and suddenly mspink.com was just a couple of blog posts on a shiny new, mostly empty site, and my entire archive was unpublished, it just made me sad to think of those 20+ years disappearing into the ether. I knew I had to keep it alive, if only for myself, and the negligible expense of hosting it. I've republished a handful of old blogs from that site, but most of them are very of their time. I just like knowing it's there, a time capsule of my opinions and activities going back to that heady post-dot com boom era when people created blogs for no other reason than you wanted to rant about shit to no one in particular. It wasn't a résumé or a portfolio. I wasn't selling anything or promoting anything. I didn't link to it on my résumé and it didn't even have my real name attached to it, which was more common than not back then. That old trope of "on the internet no one knows you're a dog."

Ms. Pink: Origin Story

It's funny to think of all the different reasons I've kept a blog going since 2001. Originally, it was launched in the wake of the closure of the internet company where I worked as a content manager and head writer for makeup.com, perfume.com, body.com and exercise.com, all of which were domains the company owned and was trying to develop in partnership with big companies like L'Oreal. It also owned Boxing.com, which I think was the only one that ever generated any profit, which partially explains why they ran out of money and laid everyone off in 2000.

When I started writing for makeup.com, I created the "Ms. Pink" persona and posted a weekly column, seasonal features about makeup and an advice column, When the site was shut down, I started mspink.com so I could keep talking to my little fan base, such as it was. I quickly transitioned from makeup advice (although that was there too for a while) when I realized it was way more fun to post about things that were happening to and around me, what my friends and I were up to and all my opinions about the world. I could swear profusely and rant about art, politics, TV and movies, astrology and all kinds of other things that may or may not have been appropriate for work or approved of by my friends and colleagues.

Several years ago, when I worked for a local software company, a work friend approached me at an after-work happy hour and asked me, in a hushed tone so that no one would overhear, if I was aware of what comes up when you search my name online. I laughed, probably something to do with astrology? He looked at me incredulously, as if to say, “…and you’re okay with that?” As a matter of fact, yes, I was… I contain multitudes, after all. I could be a Communications Specialist at a software company and blog about astrology in my life outside of work. Besides, if I wasn’t okay with it, with an unusual name like mine, there wasn’t a lot I could do to keep my life outside of work anonymous, or pseudonymous, as the case may be.

As we all know, those days of Internet anonymity are long gone. In the online world that has evolved over the last 20+ years, different kinds of people have found a variety of ways to compartmentalize and factionalize their personas. No one is the same person to every audience, whether that means "tailoring" your résumé to every job posting (or having AI do it), having multiple YouTube channels or Instagram accounts, one for each revenue stream or aspect of your personality, posting as your cat on Instagram, being a mommy blogger, a fitness influencer, a stock market bro or podcaster (which apparently now everyone is). Over the last few years, I've met a lot of people in the burlesque community who go by an alias, many of whom I don't even know by their real names. All of our interactions are within that community, and they keep their personal or "day time" professional lives separate, on the other side of a digital wall.

I'm sure that's smart, essential in some cases, despite the extra energy it takes to simultaneously live multiple lives and curate all their digital footprints separately. But there's also a push towards "authenticity" (in the corporate world, it's called "bringing your whole self to work"). I've always felt more compelled that way than compartmentalizing, even when I spent my work life surrounded by tech bros who didn't get my fascination with astrology (although I suspect they would have embraced my foray into burlesque). I think maybe at this point in my life I'd rather be myself at the expense of certain types of jobs or the kinds of friends who wouldn't approve of burlesque or believe in astrology. I'd rather work and socialize with other people who “contain multitudes” like I do, or are at least magnanimous enough to understand that someone could be a wildly intellectual and competent professional, while at the same time being an astrology podcaster, a blogger of personal opinions, a painter of badass goddesses, a fair weather roller skater and occasional burlesque dancer, and all the other things I might be on any given day.

My site still isn't revenue generating, strictly speaking, but it's my online persona and therefore my résumé, portfolio, face to the world and, for what it's worth, the first (and sometimes only) impression many people will have of me. I'm especially hopeful about this move to Squarespace. Apparently they have built-in podcast hosting and a robust set of features which I'm looking forward to digging into over the coming weeks and months. Who knows what the new solar year will hold for this old school blogger? Stay tuned to find out!

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