So Much For Thinking I’ll Never Do Another Website

I knew someone out there would send me this kind of email.

“So the workaholic in you has come back with a website,” the email starts. “We are who we are.”

This is because back in July I turned this site off after many years. The company that I had purchased the design template from went out of business. Joomla had gone to a new version which made updating the template impossible since the people who would do that weren’t in business any more. The programming language all sites run on in the background – PHP – stopped supporting the version the site was on. Half the features no longer worked.

My choices were simple: Rewrite it from scratch, preferably in a new format like WordPress, or close it down. With my daughter getting married in September, I didn’t have 100 hours of work laying around to use.

So despite the taunts of a few friends who said I’d never quit, I shut it down. And I would have been content to never mess with websites again.

But when everything died down after the wedding, I came to the realization there are really only two things in life I enjoy and do really well: One is cooking. The other is writing.

I have a kitchen to cook in.

I did not have a place to write.

So I looked at a few templates with the thought of one day rewriting the site between now and Christmas. I purchased a WordPress template that seemed like it could not only replicate what I had, but was flexible enough to add just about anything I wanted in the future. “Maybe I’ll spend a day or two a week to work on it,” I thought.

Of course being a career workaholic, I ended up spending 17 hours one day getting started. Which led to another 17-hour day. Within a week, Christmas came early, and I had the basics of a pretty solid website. I can barely see from all those hours of staring at a screen, but it’s a solid website.

It doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but I’m not sure they’re needed. I just wanted a place to write in my retirement years, trying to make my friends, think, laugh or cry. This will return to being a personal blog where I will be the only writer, there will be no pressure of advertisers, worries of hits or comments, and I’ll write when I want.

When younger, I dreamed of all these adventures I’d pursue after I retired and had the means to achieve. Now at 67, that dream has changed to sitting in a comfortable chair with a spoiled Wonderbeagle snoring on my lap while espousing some opinion that just popped into my head.

Writers write, I told myself. The only thing I don’t have in order to do that is a place to publish.

Now I do.