I looked at this site’s statistics at wordpress.com a few minutes ago and saw only a handful of hits from today. Apparently the jseliger.wordpress.com domain expired in April, and, although I thought it would automatically renew because of the blogging bundle I’d bought through WordPress, it apparently didn’t.
Instead, a spammy and nasty domain registrar named GoDaddy.com took it. Apparently, however, they’re likely to charge a very large amount of money to get it back—which means it’s probably gone forever, and the innumerable people who linked to jseliger.wordpress.com at various points in the last two years are feeding the GoDaddy beast.
I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t hurt.
The Story's Story 
I’m so sorry!
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That stinks–do you have any recourse? (And does this mean that emails recently sent to jseliger.wordpress.com are lost in the void?)
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Sorry to hear the news. (By the way, I did a prominent link on my blog to your new URL http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2012/06/jake-seligers-the-storys-story-blog-has-been-moved/ which should help you on google.
You’re right though. The real loss is for people who linked to your blog months or years ago which people won’t be able to follow. On the positive side though, the fact that your URL embeds the post date will help a lot in helping readers to locate the correct URL.
Godaddy offered to sell me your old domain for $38,000.
By the way, I once gave a talk about how to make sure in the event of death you protect your digital assets. The first advice I gave to the family members who might outlive me is: 1)make sure the web hosting bills have been paid! and 2) make sure the domains are renewed. That’s the sort of detail that non-geeky people would never know to check upon. (Also, it might help to give them power of attorney, obviously, for accessing your online accounts).
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