(Astrology Explored) From 2008 to 2022, Jeffrey Kishner used to own Sasstrology before he sold it. He also started an astrology aggregator, Astrology Blogger, bringing on everyone he could. But maintaining an aggregator is work, and if you don’t monetize it, it won’t earn you money. Jeffrey didn’t monetize it and eventually gave it up. When the opportunity came up to buy the domain, I did, though I pared down the scope because I didn’t monetize it either.
Then came the great HostGator corruption; I will never forgive HostGator for this. Or rather, the people who bought HostGator and gradually ignored it. Where before HostGator’s security was impeccable, now it allowed a malware attack on a website on the servers hosting Astrology Media Press, of which Astrology Blogger is a part, which bled through and corrupted all my blogs. They kept telling me my blogs were the problem and that if I couldn’t fix it myself, I could use a service THEY recommended for a hundred dollars per hour.
Having most of your family as tech support for corporations has its advantages, and my daughter-in-law, Dawn, volunteered to help me fix the blogs. It turned out to be an unholy mess, and I could hear her swearing from across the river, but she cleaned up the databases enough that I could ship them to my new web provider, Hostinger, which I joined in 2021.
But I never really got Astrology Blogger into the shape it deserved. For some reason, images disappeared from the feeds, and plug-in after plug-in, and proposed solutions failed me. I wasn’t faring much better on other aggregators I started: Romance Blogger and SFF Blogger. I enlisted my son, another tech admin, to help, but that didn’t work out at all. Since this was all a labor of love rather than a money-making venture, I let things slide.
Two weeks ago, I got the wild hair to finally fix things, and I enlisted ChatGPT. I fed successive screenshots into it until we found the cascade of problems mucking up my sites. SFF Bloggers was still importing images, and from there I figured out that an old image importing plug-in I had bought worked with my version of FeedWordPress and finally fixed a years-long problem.
And then I got ambitious and finally, finally, got this site (and others) to export to Facebook Astrology Blogger, Instagram Astrologblogger4 and Bluesky Astrology Blogger.
Yes!
And how, do you ask, does this relate to astrology?
I dug up the inception date of Astrology Blogger: September 29, 2007. I knew its “birthplace” was New York City, and that gave me enough to run a sunrise chart:
Well, well, well. Look what we have here: transiting Pluto in Aquarius within orb of Astrology Blogger’s natal Chiron in Aquarius. Aquarius rules networks, technology, and collective enterprises—which could hardly describe an astrology aggregator more precisely.
Pluto has also entered my tenth house of career and is edging toward my own Chiron in Aquarius. Pluto demands transformation, and here, in both Astrology Blogger’s chart and mine, it appears as transformation through healing. Astrology Blogger has been healed and may finally regain its former glory. We’ll see if Pluto does the same for me.
