With the exception of a relatively brief break a few years back, we’ve been publishing irishphiladelphia.com since 2006. Hard for us to believe, too.
That amounts to hundreds upon hundreds of stories about Irish and Irish-American culture in the Philadelphia area, including more than 500 dispatches of our weekly column, How to Be Irish in Philly This Week. We’ve tallied up an incredible 22,126 photos, including hundreds of pictures from the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day parade and several other St. Pat’s parades throughout the area. In fact, pictures from the 2006 Mount Holly St. Patrick’s Day parade led off this long parade of photos. There are 327 videos, too.
In our time, we’ve shed light on everything from Gaelic athletics to festivals to ceremonies honoring the local heroes of the Irish revolution. We’ve taken in Irish dance competitions, county association banquets, traditional Irish music sessions, the Delaware Valley Irish Hall of Fame, the Rose of Tralee, Mick Moloney’s annual fund-raiser for St. Malachy’s School, the poetry of Camden priest Michael Doyle, the Hibernian Hunger Project’s Irish stew cook-off, the senior luncheon, the Delco Gaels Dance Like a Star, and so much more. If it was Irish, we were there.
Now—for the moment, at least—we’re hanging up our shamrock deely-bobbers.
There are two reasons.
The first is this: After so many years and so many stories, we’re pretty much running out of gas and need to spend a year in the south of France. (Or maybe a few months on our front porch in the northwest of Philly, which seems more likely.)
But there is another, more pressing reason: Last spring, the website was hacked. You didn’t see the results of the hackers’ enterprise—their handiwork was hidden from public view—but we knew from the platform we use to track traffic on the site that they were there and directing website visitors to everything from concerts to prize fights (and none of them in the United States).
We instituted some measures to keep them out—we won’t bore you with the technical details—and so far our protective measures seem to be working.
But here’s the thing. These creeps are incredibly creative and persistent. We record hundreds of attacks from sources as diverse as Russia and China every day that—again, thankfully—have been stopped so far. But there’s always that worry hanging over our heads. It’s not 2006 anymore; it’s a different world out there now.
So all things considered, it seems like a good time to bring our project to a close for the moment and look for a more secure place to house the site, if we can do that.We’re grateful for every moment you have shared with us, but for now, we are on hiatus.
