STATUS UPDATE

As you probably know, since 2019 I have been keeping this website as a travel blog for my family and friends who are interested in our various global shenanigans.  Unfortunately, I am not the best blogger.  Often, in the middle of our trips – particularly journeys of long duration – I will find myself disenchanted with the considerable effort needed to maintain my blog and I just drift away from it for a time.  My soul reminds me I am not generating an income from blogging and travel is supposed to be fun!  What you may not realize is that managing a blog is actually quite a bit of work.  

To start, you need to have some basic understanding in how to use a variety of software applications to build the structure or framework (design) of your website.  Fortunately, these days there are a number of companies who offer such products and services for a small financial investment that is renewable annually.  Websites aren’t free, after all.  

Now you may find the company, product and service that you really like without much effort, or this process might take you some time researching, gathering samples, assessing feedback from other users, and generally playing around until you make a decision.  Either way, the creating of the space isn’t ever as simple as advertisers would have you believe.  If nothing else, the time you spend on deciding what content to put where, which pages to link, what to archive, what to upload, editing, designing, and, my least favorite part, SECURING, your personal internet space will be a huge commitment from you.  

After you get your page(s) designed, created, uploaded and posted, then you probably will discover that you need to add some other little software packages to your site.  These little features are hidden from the general internet user – your intended audience – and are “plug-in” features you need to prevent spammers from posting outrageous, rude, vulgar, lewd, and often lascivious comments, brute force hackers from trying to break into and destroy your website, and a variety of other tools vital for maintaining what you have so diligently created.  

Finally, you get to administer your creation.  What exactly that means is based entirely on what you are putting on your pages and how you intend your website to be utilized.  For myself, administration means drafting, writing, editing, uploading and posting the photos and content for each post and page in my travel blog.  Oh yes, there are both posts and pages!  Photos are kept in a repository.  They have to be sorted, identified, edited, sometimes reformatted, and uploaded into the software application I use for my blog before they can even be inserted into a post or page.  After the post is written and photos are inserted and links are made and it goes “live”, I need to tie that post to the main page so that readers know this is the most current post I have written.  I also need to routinely archive old posts. Lastly, I send out an email to those people who are legitimately interested and have requested notification when updates are made.  

Administration also means that I have to access those previously mentioned “plug-ins” and periodically read what they have been doing.  Many of these little gems produce handy status reports with useful metrics and reminders!  Sometimes it means that I have to sit for half an hour and blacklist ip addresses that hackers have used to try and brute force their way into my website.  Here are some photos from the tools that I use so you can get an idea of what it looks like to be under a constant state of attack.  For reference, this is just the last six months of data.

If, like me, you are often traveling for a month, then administering your site can be quite a demanding and time consuming task.  Now, perhaps, you begin to understand why I so infrequently post and often just “disappear”.  

All that said, I now come to the main point for this post.  I am revising my travel blog.  I am removing the photo albums, deleting old posts, removing some pages, and generally streamlining this site.  In the future, I may even just delete it all and relinquish the URL.  I find being a victim of constant cyberattack to be quite exhausting. It’s bad enough that I have to manage my own security and those of my dependents.  The addition of a blog that I rarely use just seems superfluous. So I thank you for all your support over these last six years and should anything of sufficient interest occur that I do decide to take up blogging again, I will let you know.