I just wanted to write about kink…

I thought running a kinky blog meant writing about kink. But eight years of running KinkyTiger.com have taught me that it’s so much more than that.

It turns out that if you want to maintain your own little kinky corner of the internet, you also need to become a part-time web developer, cybersecurity specialist, hosting administrator, Google Analytics technician and general-purpose IT department.

And over the past couple of months, my own blog has decided to test just how many of those hats I can pull off.

It all started back in early July, with the website theme deciding that it no longer particularly liked being a website. Things went wonky and suddenly I was only able to access my website through recovery mode.

I put aside writing for a bit, and I decided it was time to invest in a new theme. I searched through many, shortlisted a bunch, finally bought one, installed it and tailored it to my needs like I would with the most perfect outfit. Including going back through individual past blog posts and editing them to make sure everything still looked good.

Then, in late July, because apparently that wasn’t enough excitement, the website itself became corrupted and had to be recovered entirely. There were plugins. There were backups. There were random things that stopped working for reasons that weren’t exactly obvious. To me nor to my hosting providers.

Suddenly, I could no longer access my website, recovery mode or otherwise, for over a week. A record high for me, and it honestly felt like forever.

After endless afternoons and evenings spent on the phone with my hosting provider, trying to salvage a website I could no longer access, I eventually managed to recover it. An older backup, of course, so it was also great fun recreating a few weeks’ worth of work in just a few days. I then changed hosting and upgraded to something better.

There was considerably more swearing and crying than I would normally consider appropriate for a website that doesn’t even have ecommerce features, complicated membership-only portals, or super fancy portfolios.

And then, just for kicks and giggles, in August I discovered that Google Analytics had disconnected itself somewhere along the way. Which meant that while people were happily finding and reading Kinky Tiger, I wasn’t actually recording all of that lovely traffic.

How did I find out? In August, Monster Insights cheerfully informed me that Kinky Tiger had recorded 4k+ sessions.

GA4, meanwhile, was basically standing in the corner going: What visitors?

Excellent.

By early September, after many troubleshooting sessions between me, GA4, and my website, I had finally finished uncovering each issue and fixing them. I think. 

This year, instead of writing, I’ve had to spend considerably more time and money than planned simply getting the website back to where it should have been.

But why does it matter?

I built KinkyTiger.com because I wanted to share things. It’s not a business empire. I’m not sitting here with a team of developers and a huge marketing budget.

It’s just me.

It’s something I built because I like writing. Because I like sharing things I’ve learnt. I like to connect with weird little corners of the community and shouting about them.

Sometimes I’m writing because I have something useful to say. Sometimes because I just need to vent a little. Sometimes I write the blog post I wish I’d read five, ten or fifteen years ago. And sometimes I just have a lot of opinions that I need to compulsively share. Popular or otherwise.

The point is that I care about my blog. That’s why all this technical nonsense has been so bloody frustrating. When something you have built yourself starts falling apart, you’re not just fixing a website. You’re trying to protect something that matters to you.

And that’s when you are reminded that independence comes with a surprisingly large invoice. 

Being independent is something I’ve always valued. I like being able to make my own decisions. Running my own projects. Not having to ask permission to say what I think or write about what I care about.

However, being independent doesn’t mean you get to operate outside the systems around you. You can build your own website and still depend on a hosting company. You can manage your own data and still depend on Google Analytics 4 (*sobs while reminiscing about UA*). You can learn enough about WordPress to keep your own site running and keep yourself writing, and still end up paying extra to fix something that has gone spectacularly wrong.

And, of course, there’s a gendered dimension to this that I don’t think many people like to acknowledge. We’re constantly told that independence is the answer. Be financially independent. Build your own career. Sort your own shit out. Don’t rely on anyone else. 

And I have done my absolute best to do exactly that.

But. Independence doesn’t magically remove the structures around you. It doesn’t make things cost less, or give you a discount code. It doesn’t make invisible labour disappear.

Independence adds an invisible premium to your life. Oh, the joys.

Because apparently I hadn’t suffered enough. *Sigh*

For the last couple of months, I’ve also been discovering another particularly modern form of frustration: arguing with an AI that is supposed to be helping me. I’ve lost a frankly embarrassing number of hours because ChatGPT has repeatedly questioned things I’ve told it about my own projects, my own websites, and my own circumstances. 

Not because I asked it to fact-check me. Just because I told it something and wanted help doing the next thing. Instead, it created numerous additional tasks for me, sent me down completely unnecessary rabbit holes and put the answer I was looking for behind a series of things I apparently had to prove first.

Last week was the point where I finally called it out. And, naturally, the thing I had been saying was correct. The irony was not lost on me.

There’s something particularly irritating about being repeatedly asked to prove your own experience. Especially when you’re already the person doing the work. Especially to an AI.

And yes, I know that sounds like a small thing compared with everything else. But honestly, all small things just add up. An extra 15 minutes here. Two hours there. Another unnecessary rabbit hole. Another thing to check. Another thing to explain. And before you know it, you’ve lost hours.

Those hours I could have been spent writing. Or working (assuming I had a job, not so much these days, as I am currently job hunting which is a job in itself). Or seeing friends. Or doing something considerably more enjoyable than explaining to a machine that, yes, I do in fact know what I am looking at.

The website survived.

The data situation is getting sorted.

The theme is behaving itself again.

And Kinky Tiger is still here.

Because despite all the hassle, I still want to write. There are still things I want to share. Things I want to explain. Things I want to rant about. Things I think might help someone else navigate the wonderfully messy world of kink.

I suppose that’s one of the less glamorous realities of being an independent blogger.

You don’t just get to do the writing you love so much. You have to maintain the infrastructure that allows you to write. You have to pay the bills (in case you want to help). You have to learn things you never expected to learn. You have to deal with systems that occasionally decide to make your life unnecessarily difficult by gaslighting you and making you double guess yourself.

And sometimes you have to tell an AI to stop arguing with you. Twice. Three time, even. But I’m still doing it.

Because I built this little corner of the internet for a reason and I’m not quite ready to give it up yet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a blog post to publish.

Hopefully the bloody website lets me.