'The Online Photographer' Would Like to Relaunch

UPDATE: I turned donations off at 9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 6. In seven hours, 86 donors gave $8,044 , and that should be more than enough for all my needs here, so I don't need to collect any more funds. THANK YOU! You are extremely generous and I'm very grateful. This is an important part of the puzzle and will make it much easier to make decisions going forward. I'm going to be working with an emphasis on getting up and running again ASAP and I have some good people helping me. Don't forget that any future site will be accessible through my domain at theonlinephotographer [dot] com. That domain still currently points at TypePad, but I will put up an 'Under Construction' page there as soon as I figure out how.

By the way, I do have a complete archive of all the posts and comments, and several readers downloaded similar archives as well. So the old site isn't lost.

Below is the original "ask" for this gofundme.

I'm Mike. After a career in photo magazines, I started a "Blogger blog" in 2005 wondering if I could keep it going for a whole year. I called it The Online Photographer (aka TOP), and in the early days it was one of relatively few resources on the Web for enthusiast photographers. After two years, a passing crisis precipitated a move to TypePad, one of the best blogging platforms on the Web at the time, which became TOP's home for the next 17 years. It was wildly successful for a while, bigger than I deserved, and by 2009 I had quit all my other money-making jobs. TOP peaked in 2013, one year after the peak of the camera market.

Photography has since "come down in the world" due to the explosion of smartphones, and I'm hardly the only one feeling it. But TOP's been kept alive by a small cadre of loyal fans who donate directly to its continuation. Then, this past August 27th, came the first ugly blow—once-mighty TypePad announced it was shutting down in a mere one month and three days. And planning to take all my content with it. In 17 years I had written some five million words, the equivalent in length to 50 novels—there were 9,300+ posts, and readers had left more than 300,000 comments—many of them erudite, informed, and containing stories, experiences, and expertise you could find nowhere else.

That would have been hard enough. A mere 7 days later, though, on September 4th, TypePad experienced some sort of unexplained but catastrophic crash. (Probably, all their clients were bombarding their servers with requests to retrieve content—I know I was.) TOP vanished from the Web. It might return for the remainder of the promised month; it might not. That's where we are now.

I've contracted with a website developer to construct a new WordPress website. I normally wouldn't mind paying for this myself, and I will if I must. I want to stress that I'm not indigent, I'm not needy, and my need for help isn't urgent. I do have assets—mainly one that 2/5ths of the world's population would love to have, with walls and a roof and deluxe features such as bedrooms, a kitchen, and indoor plumbing, even. I ain't "dirt flo po." But as (bad) luck would have it, my finances had just gotten whacked—partly because of unforeseen bills and partly my own dang fault. I had just bought a new (well, a new-to-me used) car for the first time in 11 years, for one thing, which of course I now wish I had not done. But too late. And as Robert Kiyosaki famously once said, "cash flow kills." TOP has always been free.

So I'm looking to see if Friends of TOP might wish to help with my cash flow, pay the developer, and help TOP with its second transition, to a hoped-for v.3 incarnation. I'd like to keep it going if I can.

In the interests of rigorous honesty I have to point out that this might not work. This is already a less-than-ideal, poorly managed transition—partly my fault (I was not well prepared—ironic, since the Johnston clan motto is Nunquam non paratus, Never Unprepared), and partly the result of circumstances. In magazine lingo this is a "relaunch," and relaunches are perilous, touch-and-go.

Can you help out? Only if you want to. Many thanks for listening, and for reading all these years.

Mike