As some of you have noticed, my blog today looks different. For the past week or so, I have been facing a problem that can become a disaster, if it is not fixed correctly. Let me explain.

In April of this year, the company that hosts my Internet domain sent an email notifying me that my domain name was about to expire and that I had to renew it. I have no idea what happened to that email. I do not know whether the email was sent to my son or to me. The truth is that the email was never answered, the domain name was never renewed, and as a result, I lost one of my domain names.

As a result of the domain name not being renewed, the domain name expired and it was bought by someone who now uses it to promote coffee and other items. Several readers wrote to me saying that they were being transferred to the new domain. In a sense, my domain name was hijacked by someone who wants to use my name to make some money.

I called WordPress to renew my domain name, which they did. When the renew of the domain name happened, WordPress also mapped my two domains. After the mapping was finished, I discovered that the latest post on my blog was dated to January 2012.

I called WordPress and to my surprise, I discovered they do not have any posts after January 2012. After talking to the support department at WordPress, I discovered that they have not hosted my blog since January 2012.

And this is what happened. Last year I asked a friend to redesign my blog, and unbeknownst to me, when he designed my blog, he also began to host my blog. So, throughout 2012 and 2013, all my posts were being hosted, not by WordPress, but by someone else.

Thus, when WordPress mapped my domain name last week, all the posts after January 2012 were not added to my blog. This means several things:

1. I need to recover all my posts from 2012 and 2013 and place them with WordPress.

2. At the present I do not have any way of knowing who will be receiving this post. I am not sure whether the many new subscribers to my blog will receive this post. I am not sure whether the almost 100 blogs linking to my blog will be notified of today’s post.

I hope to be able to fix this problem this week. In the mean time, I will keep blogging with the old design until I find a solution to this problem and find a way to incorporate my previous posts to my current domain name.

It is possible that some of you may be redirected to claudemariottini dot org. If you are redirected to that site, please, click this link: claudemariottini.com and you will be directed to my blog. In addition, you will also discover that the link above may redirect you to claudemariottini dot wordpress dot com. This is only temporary and it will be corrected soon.

If you have bookmarked the URL to my blog, you will have to delete the old URL and create a new one with the new URL.

Thank you for your patience. This is the second time my blog has been hacked and I hope it will never happen again. When this happens, it creates a lot of problems.

What a mess!

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary