Meanwhile…

Welcome to my first irregular news update!

So… What’s Happened (In The Meantime)?

A lot has happened, and I’ll start explaining it all, from the beginning:

Let’s start with this newsletter.Â

I’ve called it “Meanwhile…” because, well, you have all the regular weird, frustrating goings-on in the world, and then BAM – “meanwhile, back at the ranch…” something brings you back to actual reality, when you get a moment of clarity, usually at home when you’ve unwound and shed the stress and frustrations of the day! So here we are, the first of my new-format newsletters, called “Meanwhile…”. I hope it’s an improvement from the previous ones.

Why did I change the format? Because I found myself putting out too many basically empty posts without actually saying anything important, or without having any news to include – just to keep to my self-imposed weekly regimen. Too often lately, there was nothing much – or nothing at all related to my writing or publishing to mention – which meant I ended up sending out empty “news” letters just to keep to a schedule.

I wanted to make my communications to you more meaningful. And that’s how this new format newsletter came to be. How I arrived at the name is a different story, but basically it’s inspired by that break in a story when you’ve reached a tention point – and then the writer puts it all on hold to drag you over to another plot point, and says: “Meanwhile…”.

What happened to all the previous newsletters – the “Another Round At The Crow Bar”? “A Peek @ My Week”? All gone, sorry. It’s too bad, I deleted them all – so if you wanted to dig into the archive of past newsletters and articles going all the way back to 2017 (or even older articles dating back as far as 2014) – sorry! They were filled with reams and reams of old news, past book releases with past versions of book covers and shovelsful of fluff really, that was no longer relevant. Faced with having to copy all that text and reconnect every link and image within them, it was like staring at the crest of a tsunami of pointless clutter! To paraphrase Dredd: It was time to clean out the fridge! Drokk!

So this is how it is: I only kept articles that added to the “aboutness” of series and individual books – as well as exploratory or philosophical articles I felt were important or relevant.  I’ve also started turning some of what used to be pages into posts – that makes it easier to organize and keep track of. The rest all went in the shredder, with the weight of my boot on it.

Doubtless by this time, you probably have a lot of unanswered questions – and I’m sure the one right at the top of the list is “what happened to your website?”

What happened to my website?

It’s gone. Christinaengela.com is now defunct, and has been since Dec 25, 2024. Basically the website you’re looking at right now is a descendant of the original WordPress website I first created back in the 2000s, having survived a number of moves and refurbishments on a variety of different hosting platforms.

But WHY?? To be perfectly blunt, I couldn’t afford the hosting fees anymore. The cost-of-living expenses being what they are now, I had better uses for R300 a month (and R400 a year on a dotcom domain name), so I cancelled it. (Here’s a comparison, just to see what you can still get for R500 these days.) There was simply no logical reason to spend more money on a website than what it brought in, in terms of referrals to my book sales pages (on Amazon, Payhip and Patreon).

But… I still needed a website.

As an author and growing YouTuber, I needed a way to connect with my audience. Contrary to popular belief, that’s not so simple these days – the internet has become a far more toxic, unwelcoming place just these past 2 years. Twitter (now indeed “X” – as in “crossed out”) is dead – overrun by trolls, nazis, ignoramuses and fake AI accounts. Facebook – or “Meta” – is well on its way to joining it, as of its recent announcement to flood Facebook, Instagram (and probably Threads as well) with fake AI profiles designed to imitate real people to *cough* “increase interaction”. On 7 January 2025, Zuckerberg announced (after a visit to Mara Lago, supposedly) that Meta would no longer be “fact-checking” any posts on any of its platforms – which on top of its already apparent failure to act on any posts users report as homophobic, transphobic, racist or otherwise hateful – just means Facebook will shortly become the same as “X” – just with a longer character count in its text-box. In the case of “X”, Musk promised to buy Twitter in order to destroy it – so for once at least, he’s actually delivered on a promise, and as far as I’m concerned, breaking his own toys seems to be his only real skill. The vast majority of “X” users making an exodus during November-December 2024, I doubt it will be long – all things considered – before people start to leave Meta’s bullshit crackhouse in droves as well.

Like many others, I migrated from Twitter to Blue Sky in 2024.  Early in January 2025, I closed my Instagram and Threads accounts since they were simply exposing me to more of the same bullshit I was already seeing on Facebook – but without the benefit of any unque or useful interaction. The only reason I’m reluctant to take the next step and close Facebook is for the market place – and because it’s mostly where my audience is. At least, for now. But I will probably still have to hold onto my account there for professional reasons for the foreseeable future as well. Nevertheless, without any really practical options on social media to act as a website substitute, I still needed a website. And to be practical, it had to be free firstly, and secondly, it had to accommodate my needs.

WordPress does have a free option, but unless I paid for a domain name, I’d be stuck with a subdomain name like “christinaengela.wordpress.com” – which I’d used before many years ago, and if you’ve been with me long enough, you’d recall that. Even so, I’d be willing to compromise – but the cost of sacrificing full control over a website, such as imposing the inability to install ANY plugins at all – and their refusal to allow free users to create posts using the classic editor just made that cost way too high and totally unacceptable to me. At the end of the day, self-hosting was the only practical answer.

That’s why I made a full backup of the site – over 5GB worth – and decided to self-host it on my own server instead. Look, I am a qualified PC technician, but setting up and managing a server, using Apache, setting up tunnels, and programming in Python are things I was never trained in – and it takes a little time to figure it all out by myself, which is why it took so long for my website to return online! Thank fuck for Perplexity, or I’d really never have made it as far as I did!

You can see the webserver in the image to the left, set up in my PC workshop/YouTube studio. The keyboard is stowed behind the screen in case any of our cats decide to take a stroll over it, or nap on it!

I was thinking I’d probably have to upgrade it to a newer PC soon, something with a faster CPU and more RAM, but fortunately thanks to experience and foresight, that would be as easy as swapping out the SSD between the old case and the new. BUT…

I ran into another snag – one that caused me to change course. You see, in order to successfully host a website from home, you need a type of router (the device that connects your PC and all your home devices to the internet) that allows you to make certain changes necessary – something called “port forwarding” for a start. Unfortunately, after finally getting my website shared as far as my home network, I was unable to get it shared (they call it “exposed”) to the internet. Yup – you guessed it, mine doesn’t have those settings available – and so, sharing it to the rest of my LAN was as far as I was going to get.

Truthfully, it was a relief to realize that I hadn’t done anything wrong, or screwed up the configuration of the server or WordPress in any way. But the problem remained – and the solution I was looking at was to buy a replacement higher-level router. Fair enough, my router is about 6 or 7 years old, and it was the cheapest, most basic router I could get with my Telkom upgrade back then – but when I weighed up the cost of a brand new D-Link router with more antennas than an actual Martian, at R3000 – it seemed like way too much to spend just to try and save R299 per month!

So after a little more digging, I finally found that rarest of rare gems: a totally FREE web-hosting platform that checked all the boxes! Freehosting.com not only offered free storage up to 10GB, but a whole list of pros I didn’t even have boxes to check. Long story short, I set about reconstituting the website AGAIN – this time on Freehosting.com.

Yes, the site does look a bit different now – and that’s because of the saying “while you’re at it…”! Seeing as I had to do a lot of repairs to the xml database when first reviving the site on my server (got the shit shocked out of me a few times with those electrodes I can tell ya!) I figured I ought to just revamp and refurbish it anyway. It has the same theme as before, but I replaced many of the images with fresh, new ones. I audited all the pages and posts and deleted everything which I felt didn’t really contribute anything to the whole or purpose of the site. In the case of newsletters, it was all old news now anyway – and the links of old shares on social media would be broken, even if I kept them, so what was the point? I only needed to keep the “about” articles really, the ones linked to from other pages that gave more information about stuff that matter to the purpose of the site!

Additionally, I’ve changed my focus somewhat. This website is about me – and yes, I’m an author – but I’m also a lot of other things as well. I decided to refocus my website to reflect my interests and activities in those other things as well. While it mainly still reflects my writing, editing and publishing activities, it also facilitates aspects such as my interest in tech, and academic interests in comparative religion, social justice, DIY creativity – and making videos.

The domain I’m using now is christinaengela.co.za – and being local (and priced at just R80 per annum) it’s much more lekkerthan R299 per month – or R3000 bucks for a new router. Since I’d already paid for the .com domain in September, I asked the old hosting company to add a redirect, but I have no idea if or when it will reconnect to the new site. Either way, I won’t be renewing it, because I have better things to do with R400.

So there you have it – the website was down a while – but now it’s back… and even better! Admit it – you thought I’d tucked tail and run, given up. Disappeared – didn’t you?

To sum up: You now know I have a new website and where to find it (you’re here reading this off it!), what happened to the old website, why there’s a new website, how it got here, and why I’ve changed the format of the newsletter. Great stuff!

Just for old time’s sake, here’s a video capture I took of the old website so you can see how it used to look, compared to this new one:

There we are, all caught up!