risk

Here's a test for whether you're a risk taker. Say you blog. Say you have faithfully posted daily for more than five years. Pretend, too, that your wild dreams are about you being a writer. So that maybe you're this closet writer for now, and maybe someday the closet will spring open and you, well practiced, what with your blog and all, will fly.

Oh, and say you've been a serious amateur photographer all your life. At times more amateurish than at other times, but still, you've always had a camera with you.

But now your story-blog is showing its age. The template, selected from the far reaches of medieval era Internet, no longer likes being told to do modern tricks. It's sort of like using a Betamax when the world has moved on to VHS. Or even DVDs.

And so your blog is now stumbling. Posts are disappearing, photos duck in, duck out, HTML errors are compounding as you struggle to put in code you don't fully understand.

So now what?

If you're a risk taker, you ignore warnings (do NOT switch to another template! you'll risk losing EVERYTHING!) and you move the whole blog to a new residence. Something more modern. With light fixtures and hot running water, as opposed to an HTML outhouse and no heat to speak of.

So here I am in my brand new surroundings. And things are working just fine! Sure, you, the reader may not care that before, clicking on the label "Poland: Warsaw" only pulled out a handful of posts, and now you'll get the full spectrum (that is, once I finish tagging everything), but I care.

Someday when I'm old and infirm and I forget that I ever traveled to Poland, I'll be able to click on Poland: Warsaw, and travel along (with what I'll think is someone else's trip).

Unless I do a major switch in the future and that one will make Ocean disappear.

Gulp.

maintenance

I'm making blog improvements. Forgive the posts for the next hours -- they are merely trial runs.