Halloween
It’s Saturday and I slapped at the alarm when it went off at 6:30. So for southeast Texas, it’s a cold and bright morning on the back porch… so I won’t be hanging out here.
It’s not the cold running me in, it’s that ball of light halfway up the sky. I just don’t feel like setting up the umbrella.
I have been spending an inordinate amount of time this past week trying to resurrect my original series of websites. This site actually started out as North Carolina Mountain Dreams. It stayed with that name for about a year until I noticed my primary category of post were called Coffee Muses. After checking and finding the domain available I purchased it and this site acquired manyl of the old posts. But, I kept North Carolina Mountain Dreams running focusing on posts about my plan at the time to retire to the mountains and using the site as a online research notebook to that eventual end.
After a few years I expanded the search and the websites. First into Virginia, then Tennessee… then bright idea time, Appalachian Mountain Dreams to contain the others. Which led me on a buying streak to add the rest of the states… Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New England and the states it contains, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and after it came available a few years in Georgia. Once that was done I had a wild idea and picked up Mountain Dreams Press and Mountain Dreams Photography.
Now the crazy thing about all of this was, like everyone else back then, I thought I could spin it into a moneymaker… and for a short while it almost seemed possible. Google adds, Amazon affiliate, other add providers… all payed just enough to cover costs. But… running twenty some websites, all with their own databases and copy of WordPress was a lot of time consuming backend work… not even including the actual writing.
Long story long, somewhere in the last decade many of the sites became dust covered relics of what I’d originally hoped. Every year or so I’d get energized and work on a design solution to combine the all into one… but the technology wasn’t really there yet… at least not without investing in a totally custom design. So on the back burner it would go…
Finally WordPress has progressed to the point it looks like I can accomplish my goal. It’s only that, over time the internet has evolved and the links in my old posts have broken. So now it’s not only importing the old posts into the new site but then updating what can be updated, and then updating the format of the old posts… so time slips away… and who even knows if anyone will care… oh well, Saturday morning muses over…
Y’all stay safe, stay healthy, and Pray for our Nation and the world. Go vote. Wear a mask. Wash your hands often. It takes us all to beat the Coronavirus.
