When it all goes south

Typepad crashed yesterday and 13 years of online art courses vanished... for now

This is an important message for anyone enrolled in my online courses (not Substack, thank goodness).

The bad news: All 30 of my online courses vanished yesterday when my longtime web host Typepad crashed.

The good news: All 13 years of content, 400+ lesson videos and 1200 printable pdf pages, were already safely backed up on other sites, so the classes will reappear with a new host platform. As soon as they have been reformatted, updated, and all their links checked, I will email new access information.

Why did this happen? Early last week, Typepad announced that it would discontinue service on September 30. Immediately, thousands of users (including me) began the huge job of migrating content to new web hosts. The traffic overwhelmed the website, and it crashed. At first, Typepad reported that the outage was due to maintenance, but today it became clear that the problem ran deeper.

Typepad says it is working to restore lost content. This means the courses may suddenly reappear today or tomorrow and continue to work until September 30. Or they may not.

It was a shock to discover that everything was gone, but I’m relieved that I still have the core material for all 30 courses, so the interruption is temporary. Thank you for being patient.

I’m also relieved that my current and future content is housed on Substack.