musings

History and status of this blog

Over the past couple of years, I have evolved in how I share these writings. In the beginning, it was just a simple email sent to Catherine's mom, containing old pictures of Alex that I would scan every morning. This was during Covid, and everyone was feeling so isolated and alone. Well, eventually I decided I had better cc Catherine on that email, so she would be aware of whatever was in it and her mom might want to chat about during their visits. Then I realized that my mom would probably appreciate the contents of this mail, and she would occasionally share them with my aunts, so they got added, and then my sisters, and then I would tell people that this existed, and they would be interested in joining, and it grew and grew.

In 2021, as we were coming out of the pandemic, I left Amazon and did a six-week road trip in my car. And for that, I wanted not only to share my adventures but also to keep a journal of them, so I cast around for a way to do that and settled on using a WordPress site, so I set up weatiesroadtrip2021.com. That worked well enough for managing the blog, and the photos, but the workflow of writing the posts, and then emailing them was a) not very mobile friendly b) flakey which meant as often as not it would hang and lose changes while creating posts c) didn't support the emailing of it, so I would have to copy and paste the post, which made for crappily formatted emails and finally d) all of that content was locked up inside of Wordpress.com - and I didn't really "own" the content.

So I eventually evolved the workflow to be driven by plain text files that I managed in git and hosted in GitHub Pages. that was a bit better from the perspective that I was in control of the content, but I still didn't have an rss feed, I had to copy and paste the post from the published website to an email, and there was a build process involved that kept getting slower and slower as I added more and more pictures. But it worked well enough for our 2024 road trip to Texas to see the eclipse.

Then, after retiring, I had time to think through this workflow and discovered the ghost.io platform. and it ticked so many of the boxes that I had, and some that I didn't know I had. RSS feed - ✅. RSS feed per tag - ✅. Email the posts - ✅. Allow people to subscribe without asking me - didn't know I wanted it, but ✅. Clean look on mobile and desktop, and in the web and in email - ✅. Easy to create \ edit \ and manage my content - ✅. This platform has been working very well, and I now feel very comfortable recommending it to anyone who wants to share content.

As a matter of fact, I have now imported all of my old content from WordPress and github into this blog, and hooked them up, so you can find them here in this blog

For example, here are some trip reports I migrated.