With all the personal stuff that has been happening in my life this last year I let the domain name for my website expire due to my Debit card being out of date for my auto-renewal. By the time I finally had the mental energy to deal with the situation, some bastards rushed in and bought my domain name. Now they have Chinese porn displayed when you go there. Not a good look for my sculpture site. There are not even any video of me.
My Website hosting service Blackknight could not help me and said I would have to deal directly with the hijackers.
I have looked into it and there seems to be a company called Gname that says they will Broker the deal of buying it back. I am sure that this is all a scam and they are one and the same that nabbed the domain when they saw I missed a payment.
I really have no idea how much they want to extort me to buy it back but if there is one thing I have learned as an international man of mystery it is to never negotiate with terrorists. They can keep the feckin' Domain.
I decided to just register a new one called www.fleetingsculpture.ie which is the Irish domain suffix. The Dotcom one they can keep which although it may cause some confusion to those that are trying to find me by internet but, I am happier to have .ie as I am Irish and it seems that they have some safeguards in place should this ever happen again. I had to prove that I was who I said I was before they allow registration.
If people do come across the .com one, well, firstly they shouldn't be touching themselves like that and secondly, I hope they can understand what happened. Hopefully, the hijackers will give it up once they realise I ain't payin'.
To be honest, Hive has become my place on the internet and I would sooner direct people here to my blog.
Back Online
So, now I have my new website set up and running. Luckily, Blckknight was able to move my WordPress files across to the new domain name. But, something I have been wanting to do for ages is to have my Hive Blog embedded like it is part of the site. I will finish this cautionary tale by putting a call out. Does anyone know the best way to do this? I would like to have a page of all my blog posts on the site much like the way PeakD displays them. I have heard that there are plugins out there but can't find them.
I have discovered EXXP WP by martin lee but that seems to just repost your blog posts to Hive. I would like to go the other way. If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated.
Let this be a lesson for those that let their domain name expire. There is a whole industry out there waiting to snipe them, hoping to make a quick book.
Ammonite Aka Fleeting sculpture aka Daniel