How was your birthday? Mine, today (Aug 29), started well with kisses, after-shave balm and a bottle of one of the best wines our region produces – Chateau Leoube, delicious despite their vineyard being owned by delusional Brexiters, Lord and Lady Bamford. It has continued in pleasant fashion, with a table booked for tonight at Bo, arguably the nicest restaurant in Le Lavandou, the corner of France where I spend up to half the year.
Then came the party-pooping e-mail. Typepad, the company that hosts this and hordes of other sites, had a birthday present of its own: it's the end of the road for them and, with them for us.
Salut! Live has between now and the end month to transfer itself and an incredibly extensive archive to another host or all that effort, work and passion is lost for ever. Here is what Typepad said:
"After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.
Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content. "
To say I am devastated would be an understatement. Salut! Live began in 2007, one of the offshoots of the Salut! blog that I launched when The Daily Telegraph booted me out after 29 years, 20 of them spent writing about folk music as a sideline to my reporting duties. "Right column, wrong newspaper," as Ian A Anderson, editor and founder of the eternally missed fRoots magazine put it.
Salut! Live deserves to live on. I have been privileged to have the help of Andrew Curry, Steve Peck and Bill Taylor, plus many other friends and acquaintances, in making it a site artists and enthusiasts seem to appreciate. Andrew is my deputy editor and, being more tech savvy, has already come up with a possible solution.
To have it done professionally would cost money I frankly don't have. Typepad has probably not left sufficient time for a crowd funding exercise and there is no guarantee that would work anyway.
If anyone has bright ideas, I hope they will share them. Watch this space for updates, which I hope will not include our own closure announcement.
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