I’m making lemonade out of an ‘S’ load of lemons
ohbrooke.net is now ohbrooke.com!
On Tuesday I signed closing papers for the sale of my Sacramento home, chopped my hair, and lost my domain name {ohbrooke.net}, all before 11 am. Apparently my hosting company had the wrong email address for me, so they were unable to inform me that the domain was expiring. Somehow in the 20 phonecalls I’ve had with them this year, they haven’t mentioned, “oh, and hey, your domain expired 2 months ago…” It was the only product of several I have with them that was not on auto-renewal. Fantastic!
So, needless to say, despite the excitement of the close of the house, and the mediocre haircut, I was devastated by the domain loss. Here I am, 25 year old wife that drives my husband crazy with my boring independent films and need to rearrange furniture incessantly, just feeling my way through this blogosphere. I have been cultivating the traffic and content with the help of friends family and new blog friends.
This brings me to yet another transition that has reared its ugly head this week. An unstable day job, the loss of a real estate investment, and now a blog identity crisis. This imposed transition has me thinking:
Should I change what I write about?
I would love to write about more personal things, not just design, is that okay?
Should I cut my losses and quit?
As I scrambled to find a new domain name to see if I could somehow recover and patch together the traffic equity that I have gained intensely in the last few months, I found a very expensive light at the end of the tunnel. ohbrooke.COM was purchased but not in use, and so I emailed the owner to see if I could take this unfortunate event and spin it into a positive. Here is how the emails went:
Me – Are you using the domain ohbrooke.com? Is it for sale?
Him – I currently am not using ohbrooke.com; It was in development but the model flaked out. If you are interested in the domain, please make me an offer. I would be curious what you plan to do with the domain name.
Me – It looks like you own it for about 6 more months, I’ll give you $40 for the six months.
Him – A fair market value for this domain would be in the $550 to $750 range. I would sell the domain for $550.
Me – $200
Him – $375
Me – $300
Him – Deal.
So, the lemonade in this “S”-load of lemons is that I’ve now upgraded to ohbrooke.COM. Now I have to figure out – how to let my readers know I’m here, what direction I want to take this blog, and what on Earth I’m doing with my life.
Thoughts?