I started this blog when I retired in 2019, just before COVID.  It was an activity that occupied me during those months of quarantine and allowed me to share my interests and projects.  I was, and still am, ignorant of blogging technology.  Yes, I have, in my career, written code for the world of web pages and browser-based applications, but every time I did so, I wondered, “How could this ever work?”  It struck me as a house of cards, with fragile links and unreliable and inconsistent page renderings.  

And I still have that impression.  But I found a place to take care of the awful details of getting the network coding right, and to let me make a nice presentation of the photos and stories I wanted to share.  Wordpress.com allowed me to set up a website for free!  (But I eventually paid them to not annoy my visitors with ads).  It has been a convenient place for me to post my various interests, events, and projects while learning the conventions and protocols for “content management systems” (CMS).

But while WordPress.com took care of the administrative and technical details, making it easy for me to sponsor a website, it did so by limiting the options and capabilities available to small-time bloggers.  This minimizes their support costs because there are fewer ways for inexperienced users like me to get into trouble.  The website just works because I can’t do things that are outside of their site rules.

And this has worked well for me for the past five(!) years.  But every so often, I found that I wanted to do a little more, something that would require an extension of the CMS.  There are many such extensions, called “plugins” that offer cool features.  A simple example is a plugin that allows an image to be shown at full-screen size and for the user to zoom and pan to inspect it.  Or to present a sequence of images as a slideshow.  Or to make a virtual 3D environment from a set of images.  There are many more, and I often encountered them when I wanted to share some experience in a blog post.  Unfortunately, my free, or even my “personal” subscription to WordPress.com did not allow plugins.  I would have to upgrade to a business plan at a considerably higher expense.

Instead, I found a way to migrate my website to a new host.  It offers the same CMS (the WordPress platform, just not the .com version with its restrictions), at a modest annual fee.  There will be more overhead on my part to keep it functioning properly, as witnessed by it taking me a month to make the transition.  The learning curve has been steep, but I am optimistic for its future.

Hopefully, the transition to a new website host will be invisible to you, but there will likely be rough spots and broken pages.  Please tolerate them, and please let me know when you encounter them!  It helps me keep climbing that curve. 

To my subscribers:  I had to recreate the subscriber list on the new host.  Currently, both sites are active, and there may be some conflicts.  If you previously signed up for email notices when I post something new, this is a good time to consider if you want to stay on that list.  If so, I encourage you to sign up again using the form below, which will transfer and confirm your place on the new subscriber list.  Don’t worry, the email notifier consolidates any duplicates and won’t send you multiple messages (I think).