Secondary Creations: The End of an Era

I had today off from work and it's been almost entirely an Etsy day. I finished making one rosary that I'd started yesterday, took photos of and listed four new rosaries and pulled a couple more out of the "inactive" void, learned how to make treasuries and made two of them, spent too much time on the forum (which isn't unusual) and generally did everything I could to avoid doing what I need to do... write an email that will probably shut down the forum on my Tolkien-related site.

It's all Etsy's fault. For about the last year I've been spending so much time working on my Etsy shop that I've basically ignored the forum, and evidently I missed some updates to the program I use and now the security is breached and someone has injected malware, so my webhost has blocked all access to the site. The only way I can get it open again is to let the webhost remove the forum, and then check all of my other files. (Every other file on the site is static HTML, so there shouldn't be any problems there.)

The forum is a fairly new addition to the site - it's only been there for two or three years while the site's been around for about a decade. Its most important use has always been to hold my Tolkien-related writing: essays and such. A few years ago, a forum some of us frequented shut down and I offered to host a replacement on my site. Only a handful of people made the trek from the other forum to mine, and even most of those have wandered off. I think the three or four that still drop in are just being nice to me. I've been actively working on one set of essays, but the forum is pretty much off the radar.

I'm not sure what I'll do from here on out. I tend to like static pages better than blogs for serious writing, because new posts don't push old ones down into oblivion; you can organize the pages any way you want, and it doesn't have to be by age. The only problem, of course, is that people can't comment. I might start a second blog where I can just link to new stuff I've done on the site and let people comment there. I'd rather have blogspot worry about the security than needing to do it myself.

So, anyway, I'm kind of sad and I'm hoping no one will be too upset about losing what they had posted on the forum. I'll have to write that email tomorrow.

Just because we always need to have some rosaries to link to, here are the four new ones listed today. They're all in the pinkish range because those are the backgrounds I was using for the photos:

Peach moonstone and aventurine