More regular updates can be found on Bluesky and the Message Board.
Road Trip
Just returned from a brief road trip in the environs of Washington, Baltimore, and Wilmington DE, and here are a few photos for your amusement. This wasn’t really a “research” trip, so I didn’t come back with too much.
Happy Anniversary
Today, I’m saying “Happy anniversary to me.” Eight years ago today — more or less — this site made its debut. It’s been fun, and I’d wax more nostalgic about it if I weren’t so darned busy this week.
Anyway, thanks for sticking around for so long.
Norfolk and the Tidewater Area
Interesting trip to Norfolk VA and the Tidewater area this past weekend while I was having all the domain problems. It’s a fascinating place that I plan to visit again soon for a more detailed research excursion. But here are two shots from this weekend:
The first is a former Food Fair location on Little Creek Road in Norfolk. Its exterior is quite well preserved, despite having been recycled as a Dollar Tree location. This is actually one of the first former Food Fairs I’ve actually seen “live and in person”, and I hope to visit more soon.
The second is related since it’s pretty obviously a former Food Fair-owned J.M. Fields department store. This one is apparently about to be torn down; it sits right next to the area that Virginia Beach is redeveloping as the “downtown” it never really had. I assume it’s been abandoned a long time, as it still amazingly bears the logo of the long-defunct HQ (Home Quarters) chain, which hasn’t existed in more than fifteen years, if I recall correctly.
Dotmaniac.com: Incompetence, Negligence or Just Plain Fraud?
The site seems to be back. For now. I’m busily trying to get all my domains moved the bloody hell out of the Tucows/Dotmaniac universe before something else can go wrong.
Here’s a chronology to date:
19 October: I renewed Groceteria.com on Dotmaniac’s website.
24 October: Despite being renewed, Groceteria.com “expired”, with its status changed to something called “clientHold”, which — I later found out — means that it has expired and will no longer resolve.
25-26 October: I spent the bigger part of both days trying to contact anyone who could help me. Dotmaniac never answered their phone: no voice mail, no nothing. I also tried contacting Tucows, the back-end registrar (Dotmaniac is a reseller), and got no response from them either. Groceteria had been offline for at least 36 hours when I had to leave town on Thursday, and I was pretty sure another of my sites would be gone by the time I got back on Sunday.
28 October: I was right. By Sunday, there was no Groceteria, no other site, and no email. Needless to say, no one at Tucows or Dotmaniac had gotten back to me either.
29 October: More contact attempts, more frustration. Early this afternoon, a friend of Mark‘s suggested a method that might at least get the sites back online, and it seems to have worked. I’m now trying to get all the domains transferred to a different registrar. I also filed a complaints with ICANN, the BBB, and Tucows compliance office.
I really didn’t need this right now. I’m already about as tightly wound as I can stand to be, and with this and other things hanging over me, my very much-needed “stress reducing” weekend road trip didn’t really do the trick either. I’m not a pretty sight today.
Thanks to incompetence (or just plain negligence) on the part of Dotmaniac.com, I’ve wasted countless hours, lost a fair amount of ad revenue (and a good chunk of my hard-won search engine placement), and become an ever bigger ball of stress than I was a week ago.
I’ve also discovered that you should be really careful where you register your domains, because there’s almost no oversight over the process, and you could find yourself at the mercy of a shady operator like Dotmaniac.com. These slimy losers are a part of the Interlink Network Group, located in Vancouver WA. If they ever answered their phones, you could call them up and tell them what you thought of them at 888.888.1051 or 877.744.6638. You could, if so inclined, also send them a fax at 360.571.4538. However, if you actually do business with them, you’re taking a terrible risk.
Site Problems Courtesy of Dotmaniac.com
Of course, if you can read this, you’re not having trouble accessing the site. But if you had trouble on Wednesday, it was due to an error on the part of my domain registrar. I renewed Groceteria.com last week, but apparently they never marked it as such, and the domain was allowed to “expire”, making this site completely inaccessible to most of the world as of Wednesday morning. I have some evidence that it will be corrected by Thursday — not that the aforementioned registrar has answered any of my queries, mind you.
Sorry for any inconvenience. It pretty much sucks for me, too.
My Mural (Sort Of)
Photo by Mark Winston.
Finally, a picture of the historic mural in the new/old Lucky Stores of Northern California. I’ve been itching to see this, because I supplied their ad agency with three of the six photos they used. Once again, my betrothed has come to the rescue.
Randomness
Sorry. I haven’t been doing much exploring of my own lately, although I have completed a very nice paper on the validity of paid placement search engine results and also an annotated bibliography on historical document digitization projects in the past few weeks, just in case anyone cares. But I’m planning on getting away this weekend, so there’s no telling what I might come back with (or where I might go).
Above photo courtesy of Mike in New Jersey.
The photo above shows the remains of an A&P on Mt. Prospect Avenue in Newark. It’s still selling groceries probably seventy years after A&P moved in, so the location was obviously pretty good. The sign was evidently of pretty high quality as well.
Above photo courtesy of Jess Cliffe, Vintage Seattle.
Recently spotted online:
- Vintage Seattle on the closing of the 1960s era Marina-style Safeway store in Bellevue.
- Pleasant Family Shopping, featuring some of the most beautiful vintage store photos I’ve seen anywhere.
Columbia SC
We all have our fetishes related to vintage stores, I guess. One reader is particularly interested in floor tiles, while a few others are fascinated by various HVAC components. A big one for me has always been the front entrance. I get really excited when I find an old store that still has its original door configuration, and especially so when it has its original doors, as does this former Colonial store on North Main Street in Columbia SC. I was obsessed with old doors when I was a kid and was first looking at — and drawing pictures of — old stores.
Here’s another one from my Saturday road trip, located on Harden Street in Columbia’s Five Points area. I’m not sure what it was (Columbia is definitely a future research candidate) but it sure is pretty.
Maybe I’ll add a “doors” feature to the site one of these days.