It’s been far too long in coming, but hopefully in short order, this website will not only be live (it actually is now, though no one’s checking it out because I haven’t declared it as active yet, but when I do, boy, howdy, people by the half dozen will come a-runnin’!), but will also look decent and be usable and less embarrassing than it does at the moment.
It’s been a bit of a trial, first with letting my domain name go a couple of years ago because I wasn’t doing anything with it, only to find it gobbled up immediately by what I’m sure is an automated system somewhere that gobbles up recently expired domain names. That’s a guess, but I found mine I think the next day in a list of available site names that were available for a price. A few hundred dollars, or something. So I assume the business model is eat up newly expired domain names that people maybe accidentally let expire and have them pay you in order to get their domain names back.
Does that actually work? Who the hell knows? Maybe it’s a total crapshoot and they’re hemorrhaging money, or maybe the people running it are wealthy beyond reason and are, in fact, running that business from their own private island somewhere in the south Pacific. Probably something in between those extremes.
So yeah, I willingly let my domain name go but then later on, I’m sure not coincidentally (and because the universe likes fucking with people that way), I wanted to start another website. But oh dear, what to do with my domain name being someone else’s property? The answer, of course, is to risk driving my friends and family around the bend with pitching all kinds of new domain names to them: What about this one? What about that one? I kind of like this seventh one, but does it feel like me?
Then once we had all (well, those who were still speaking to me) whittled down the Pollock-like spray of possible options, it came to finding if their URLs were available. And I finally got one that checked all the boxes plus was available, so I jumped on it through a hosting service that promises super easy website construction.
Only it wasn’t as easy as they made it sound. And then, once I’d written some content for it and was trying to work on the layout and was looking forward to the big launch day–finally, the website is done and up and ready for your collective enjoyment! And I can quit Facebook like I said I would a year or something ago but have been holding out on in order to make the big announcement about my website going up!–I found out that that hosting service wouldn’t do something fundamental that I wanted my site to do.
So then I did some research and ended up here at WordPress (or back here, really, as this was what my initial website had been done with years back, before I didn’t do much of any interest with it), ported over all my content, and got to work piecing together something that looks decent and is usable, hopefully even inviting, that people will want to come back to again and again.
And that’s pretty much where I am now: Writing content for a site that has gone through a bunch of changes recently and went through some more bigger ones just earlier today, but on one computer I thought I’d at least gotten something done that on another computer doesn’t appear at all, so hey… back to the drawing board to figure out what’s going on this time.
The plan still remains to write here as I can, but I’m not yet convinced I’ll be doing it daily. Don’t get me wrong: I could do it daily, but I don’t want readers to have to wade through day after day of me hemming and hawing without anything of particular interest to say, only to find a decently interesting post every handful of dull ones. Perhaps I’ll build myself up to the point of doing it daily and actually making it work. But until then, I suspect I’ll stick with writing when I’ve actually got something to say. something good, ideally, because I’m working on shaking free of the negativity that seems to hammer everyone through news and social media and has been seeping into my own brain too much recently, so I’m actively trying to be more positive and focus on better things, and hopefully that’ll be reflected here.
Onward.