ANUSTART

WTF is The Dana Zone?? This whole business started a year ago when I traded in my old phone. Typically impulsive, I failed to do due diligence before handing over the device and didn’t back up my 2FA accounts. (For those who don’t know, these are tied to just one physical device.) Fortunately you can usually use some other means to recover access to your online accounts and the re-set up 2FA, which is what I painstakingly proceeded to do. Except when I went to recover access to Amazon Web Services and saw that I needed to receive a code at my old Sloop Creative email address, and remembered that that address hadn’t successfully received an email in at least a year. Probably just a misconfigured MX record, but I’d never actually looked into it.

AWS was where I managed the domain and hosting for my personal website and numerous other sites and files as well. Realizing that losing access to my account would mean being unable to renew these domains, I reached out to AWS support hoping for another solution. But numerous emails and phone calls later, I’d accomplished nothing, just a ping pong ball being swatted back and forth between the security folks and the account folks because neither actually had any authority to address the issue at hand. Ultimately I just decided to abandon the account—no mere mortal was going to navigate this bureaucratic labyrinth.

I’m really not sure what all will disappear from the web when the bills stop getting paid. danajohnson.co will be gone. But I’m fine with that. I never really liked the domain name anyway. Every time I looked at it, I was just reminded that the domain I’d actually wanted—just a single letter away—wasn’t available. And I’d stopped updating it two years back, stuck in the middle of a Jekyll-to-Eleventy migration and with a stodgy and dull design I’d grown bored of. Maybe it was time for a shot in the arm to finally finish the migration and update the design. And that’s where dana.zone was born. The design’s not quite there, but I’ve migrated the old content over and shifted the focus from trying to get work to just being a space to think, write, and share dumb screenshots. It feels nice to finally be able to put finger to key again and throw a quick note up on ye old personal website.