You Never Write, You Never Call --Kevin Dujan Is Back At Hillbuzz

And his own admin accidentally debunked his New Website $ob-$tory. 


Kevin Dujan  returned to Hillbuzz after another prolonged absence, ascribing it to chronic ill-health. But his current flock hive of shearlings worker bees doesn't know that the last time he went AWOL, he came back with a different heartrending tale.


Now it is the official position of Snarkopolitan to wish everyone the best of health.  So if Kevin Dujan is as ill as he says, this "out to get him" blog's proprietress hopes he makes a complete recovery.

But it's not like Dujan hasn't pulled this disappearing act before, as detailed in the post below.
 In both cases,  he couldn't so much as get himself to the computer to send a single email to his frazzled co-bloggers, last time for weeks upon weeks, and this time, for months upon months.

Pardon the skepticism, folks, but we've all had a crisis or two, or been close to someone in crisis. We've lost loved ones, gotten ill, suffered financial setbacks. Ask yourself: would you blow off your responsibilities, not for a week while absorbing the news, not for two, but for months on end? And when you finally did get in touch with your neglected friends, wouldn't maybe, just maybe, the thought of apologizing to them cross your mind instead of talking about your empty pockets?


The first time Kevin went AWOL, all his then-followers had to remember him was the last post he wrote:  one of his many pleas for money, the PayPal button glowing at the top of his blog like a beacon. He left up a post asking for money for the new site, and then stuck brand-new co-blogger and unpaid amanuensis Chrissy with watching the hive while the beekeeper went on a prolonged sabbatical.



At least he's not coming back snarling this time, but he's still squeezing the bees. And to do that he's still blowing a whole lot of smoke:
Additionally, moving HB from WordPress to the new site was a disaster and a bad decision on our part — I am in deep, deep debt because of the move and ad sales do not come close to paying the server costs.
Kevin is evidently unaware that his cry of poverty due to the expenses of moving to the new platform has been unwittingly rebutted by his own loyal (Wake up, Bridget!) admin.

• Bridget already told readers that the blog redesign cost Kevin Dujan nothing, because she designed it for him for free.

She put five thousand dollars worth of her own expertise designing the new platform:

This includes yours truly, who designed the whole thing (including the new logo and Action Bees) and donated nearly $5,000 worth of time to get this site off the ground (which I was glad to do) without an expectation of a return on investment.

Got that? The redesign didn't cost Kevin Dujan a single penny. 

Now about those insanely expensive servers: 

A trusted advisor of Snarkopolitan informs me that the site for his company--a heavy-hitter in industrial manufacturing, a worldwide market---shares a server with a number of other, equally international, corporations. They are represented in every country around the world, and this runs them about a hundred and fifty dollars a month. Sure, over the course of a year that's nearly a couple thousand, but Kevin doesn't have to rely on ads for his blog---his own ( never updated) thermometer graphic shows he collected over thirteen hundred dollars for these mysteriously expensive "servers" before he disappeared. 

So my advisor, who isn't a web designer but has participated in constructing many commercial websites,  is highly doubtful of the veracity of Dujan's cries of server-derived poverty. I should add that on the occasions when Rush Limbaugh mentioned him, Hillbuzz did not crash to my knowledge. 

Of course, since Hillbuzz has zero transparency, there's no way to tell how much money Dujan has taken in, but we know one thing: Kevin's devoted Celtic cheerleaders, Bridget and Kathleen, had to lay out their own money to keep the site going.

We do worry about him often, and continue to keep him in our thoughts and welcome him back with open arms if he returns. But this happened rather abruptly, with not a lot of preparation for us as to what we should do about HillBuzz, after having just finished building a full-featured site for him with very expensive hosting requirements (which used to be free on WordPress.com). So, we’ve tried to keep the site alive as best as we can, so there is still a place for all of you to come to read, talk, and contribute, and so the community that had been built would not die. This is at personal expense to us (like, real dollars, writing checks for high-end hosting) as well as a lot of time where we could be actually earning money.

 Who is empowered to dip into the PayPal account represented by the omnipresent button besides Kevin Dujan? Evidently not his admins. If they can't do that, then they can't know how much money is in the account---and to question the Great Beekeeper is to be labelled an "Eeyore." Horrors! 

Various Ex-Buzzers have ruefully confessed, in Snarkopolitan comments, to sending Kevin Dujan large sums, which some of them could ill-afford. One lady sent him enough to run, let's say, this slick Siemens website for a quarter of a year. 

Indeed!

There's no disputing his veracity on the amount of sheer verbiage he does crank out when he is at his post. Although he doesn't specify his claim of "25,000 words I generate" (day? week?), I'm willing to specify per day, or perhaps even hour. And he reminds us, it is:

 hard, time-consuming, life-absorbing work that’s endless and unpaid. 


Well, strike up the string section for the blogger who doesn't get paid!
Brought to you at sporadic intervals by Mrs. Polly of Snarkopolitan, the undead blog, where we somehow knew without being told that it is bad practice to squeeze bees! ("relentless daily attacks" my delicate pink foot.)