Tonight I went out to my favorite site to try and shoot the moon. Not just shoot, but post and reflect as well. The fact that I am able to post a second “current” blog post says a lot about my comfort level with getting this part of the site to work together with the other pieces.
I have been working on this (I hope) last major conversion of my website. The great switch to WordPress has been going on for at least three years as I write this. I’ve tried a lot of things to understand the world of WordPress and how this type of website works. I’m exhausted. I’m beat. I am drained. For years I just wanted to write and post images.
The first problem that reared its ugly head was the fact that I was building a house without any idea of how to install the electricity, build a wall or do the plumbing. I did not think it would take years just to figure out how to build this house. I’ve done conversions before, but nothing as complicated as this. Now I am facing the issues of the interior design and all of the content switching.
I would get one part done and then I would run into a problem with another piece. Looking back I can see that a large portion of the early infrastructure was built in June of 2019. Sometime before that the makers of this template decided to abandon the blog section of the the theme. Therefore, while the camera still clicked, the pen stayed silent for years. I never imagined that it would take this long to feel that I finally had all of the pages working.
Weekends are remembered for 10 hour slogs through formatting issues on a Saturday only to be repeated on Sunday as progress remained elusive. Some days I worked just on formatting and rebuilding parts of the quote libraries. The old site has remained “live” all this time, at least in the quote libraries. First to totally switch were the nature quotes and then the adventure of life quotes.
The lack of a blog haunted my office. It annoyed. It also drove me to keep open the doors of Facebook when I wanted to abandon it years and years ago. The primary reason to use it was to keep up with and let family know what we were doing. Now the kids are mostly silent.
The one good thing that FB has accomplished is to date organize all of my photographic “events” where otherwise everything is cataloged by subject.
And now the back-filling. I have been unprepared for all of the time that it would take just to track down some of the images that were used 20 years ago. In some cases all I can find is a poor scan and in the interests of time I’ve figured out that it is best to move on if originals cannot be found easily.
In some ways the pandemic has been my friend for at least two of the past three years. With all travel for us shut down the time has been there to plod on through the site prep, laying foundations and hooking up the wiring. Hopefully these last two months represents the final segment and the writing and posting and upgrading can begin in earnest.
