This week I exploded two websites. Not really, but that’s kinda what it felt like.
I decided, in what felt like a spur-of-the-moment decision, that I no longer wanted to keep up two personal blogs. While I had been blogging weekly at The Pragmatic Historian for about two years, my blogging at this site, maryewarner.com, has lagged. If I didn’t have a job and other obligations, sure, I could write for two blogs, but that’s not my reality.
Along with the difficulty of keeping up two blogs from a time perspective, I realized I had slipped into “blogging with obligation,” the sense that I needed to keep writing about the same focused content on a regular basis because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do as a blogger.
Waaaay back in 2008, eons ago in blogging time, I was introduced to the concept of “blogging without obligation” from TARTX, the idea that I could blog what I wanted when I wanted. It was liberating then and revisiting the concept liberates me again now.
While I enjoy writing about the uses of history, which was the purpose of The Pragmatic Historian, that’s not all that I’m about. I have a promiscuous curiosity that leads me across fields and I want to be able to write in a way that reflects that variety.
To that end, I decided to roll all the content from The Pragmatic Historian into my Mary E Warner site. For fans of The Pragmatic Historian, you’ll find this content by searching for the category ‘pragmatic historian.’ That will still be a topic I cover, but you’ll find other content here, too, like art I’ve made, books I’ve read, and quirky observations about life. I will breathe much easier knowing I only have one blog to manage.
Work on the newly blended MEW/TPH site continues because, alas, the photos did not load into the new site. It’s a long story and I thought I had lost them all, but I had made backups, so the photos were still there, they just weren’t loaded into WordPress. I managed to get them back into the WordPress media library, but they did not load onto their respective pages. That means I have to go through post-by-post, over 340 posts, to get everything back to the way it was (or as close as possible). It’s tedious work that will take a while, but it’s giving me a great opportunity to revisit all of my posts, which is its own history lesson.
For those of you patient enough to keep reading through all of my blog transitions and explosions, thank you. 🙂
