Reboot the Blog: The Raven’s Return Flight

Reboot: Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del on the Blog

Have you ever reached a point on a project where you just wanted to hit the reset button? When you reboot a project, it can feel like you have wasted all of the time that you have already invested in it. However, sometimes a fresh start is the best way to jump-start a project that has stalled out.

How I Got Here

I’ve been a webmaster for nearly 20 years now. My website has evolved over time and through several online personas. When I started out, I utilized free hosting services that only offered usage of a sub-domain. Eventually, I moved over to a low-cost, paid hosting service on my own domain. Over time, tools and technology have changed, but my mission has remained the same.

I’ve rebooted my website a couple of times over the years. Sometimes a change in hosting services prompted a reboot. I’ve also rebooted my website due to new technologies and web development tools that I have discovered.

When I decided to start blogging again, it was a tough decision to scrap all of my previous work. However, I found that a lot of my previous work is out of date. I wrote reviews of businesses whose doors are no longer open, shuttered games, and apps that are no longer supported.

Cleanup Vs. Clean Slate

When weighing the costs of cleanup of the last iteration of my website and doing a full reboot, there were two factors that I considered. I had to consider the content and the technology.

I found that even though half of my content was irrelevant, there was still the portion that will always have relevance. So, I filed all of the relevant posts into a vault. Over time, I plan on revisiting my vaulted posts, rewriting them with the insight that I have gained in the years since they were first written.

Previously, I utilized WordPress for content management. I definitely wanted to stick with this platform. With the scaled down scope of my content, there were a lot of plugins that I no longer needed. I could have uninstalled the unneeded plugins, but I found that it would be easier to maintain a clean slate than to try to track down which plugins that no longer served a purpose for me.

Blog Starting…

Hollywood has shown us that reboots are risky. Audiences have expectations that to be met for a reboot in any media to succeed. The key is keep the spirit of previous iterations to please the existing audience, while still providing fresh material to draw in a new audience.

Since I am author, editor, and webmaster, and I have a career outside of this site, I plan on publishing once a week. I may have weeks of more output than that, and I may have weeks with no new posts. My main goal is to keep this site active and to grow it into a thriving site.

I’m not quite sure where this journey is going to take me. I just hope that you will join me for the ride.