Today is one of those bittersweet moments in my life. A little less than 13 years ago I decided to try out this blogging thing. Ron had put up his Dead Reckonings blog and I thought it was pretty cool. I was lucky enough to be at the forefront of the web evolution at my day job and was in the first formal organization created to research and learn how to leverage this new emerging technology – what better way to learn than to spend my free time tinkering around with the latest browsers (Mosaic/Netscape for those that remember back that far). Ever since those early days I’ve managed several personal websites. A blog was just another step in that evolution that paired well with my interest in capturing my thoughts on the things going on around me. Eventually, the wildlife side started taking hold to the point I broke that off to isolate it a bit from my general musings. I opted to use the WordPress service to host this new wild side of Intrigued. It was a bit rough going at first as I was used to having total control of the branding and presentation. If I didn’t like the default, I just went into the code and changed it. Now I was reliant on the service to manage the servers, upgrades, etc. Over the last couple of years I became pretty comfortable with the service offering. Unfortunately, my personally managed WordPress install was taking more and more time to manage. Upgrade after upgrade was taking more and more time. Making sure all the security patches were applied to the supporting systems (PERL, DB etc) was getting to be a pain through my hosting provider and then I was constantly fighting the fact I didn’t have SSL enabled which caused the newer browsers to put a warning on my site implying to my readers that I was compromising their security – don’t even get me started on the GDPR crap. Hard enough to deal with that at the day job, but to come home and fight with it was getting too much. As I am retiring and leaving that hassle behind, decided it was also time to shed the overhead of managing my personal WordPress blog. That is the bitter part – feels like letting go of a good friend – one built from the ground up with blood sweat and tears.
Now for the good news. I am still just as hooked on blogging today as the day Ron introduced it to me. With the success of the Wildlife Intrigued Blog using the WordPress service, I’ve decided to redeploy LifeIntrigued on their platform. If there was a tipping point, it was the ridiculous price Go Daddy tried to charge me for an SSL certificate. Not to get too technical here, but that is needed to encrypt the traffic to protect your logins etc. That fee would have covered the next 10 years of my subscription service that comes with this feature by default. Long(er) story short, I now have another WordPress account and procured another URL to reference it. Still working out the kinks so please bear with me as I get everything transferred over. The posts should all be over there now, but still have some branding tweaks to make and trying my best to preserve all the internal links that reference the old site. From this point forward, you should reference my mothership Life Intrigued blog with the following URL:
This does mean you will have to update your links or bookmarks if you have those saved. If you do happen to “follow” this blog, you will also need to update that as well – simply “follow” when you navigate to the new site or update whatever RSS feed tool you might be using. Apologize for any inconvenience. It was time, and at this point in my life, I’d rather spend my retirement out in the field to bring you new blog content rather than sitting in my den making sure all the technical glitches are kept to a minimum. Hope to see you on the other side – you will find that the branding is slightly different, but it will look almost identical to the Wildlife Intrigued branding so there will now be consistency there.
…. and now, a simple goodbye to my old friend.
