So, maybe I am back…probably on an infrequent basis.
While I have never been too big into the whole social media thing, I have been through a few iterations of building/maintaining a website over the past umpteen years.
Initially, I experimented with a personal “vanity” webpage in the mid 1990’s. Then I spent some time playing with my interest in highway systems (the content of which has subsequently been supplanted by various highway projects at Wikipedia). Then, a curiosity into the early days of blogging and SEO had me meandering off into some political posts (best forgotten), and after falling into a new hobby of amateur radio I attempted to do some ham blogging before a few hosting issues left me frustrated enough to find better things to do with my time….especially with some family and work demands creating a severe limitation on my free time.
In the past several months, however, a few things have happened:
First, with the pandemic, I went from spending almost 50% of my time traveling to living within a geographically small bubble, as both my wife and I have health issues that had us extremely cautious about COVID. I wouldn’t say that I found a lot of free time…but I did have some additional downtime…and I probably became the last person on earth to fall down the YouTube rabbit hole, and to become acquainted with other venues where “content producers” dwell.
Now, despite some of my past online activities, I am skeptical about the wisdom of sharing too much information about one’s self via social media, and it is not really in my nature to want to be in the spotlight the way that “influencers” seem to. But, I have to admit to being curious about how such folks do the things they do…and my nature is such that to indulge such curiosity, I have to learn how “things” are done. So, I’m resurrecting my old venue for such explorations.
And second…in the past few months, some projects in my home office / ham shack have had me questioning my “Google-fu”. In years past, if I wanted to know how to do something, or ran into some kind of tech issue, a quick web search usually turned up a solution; after all I can’t be the first/only person to have run into the quandaries I sought to resolve.
However, recently, I’ve been increasingly confounded by not being able to find solutions to the brick walls I was running into. Whether that’s because I’ve been dealing with more specialized puzzles, or whether search engine algorithms have evolved such that my prior search tactics don’t work as well…I can’t say. But perhaps some of my tinkering ought to be documented so that others might make use of the information.
So, with that background, I’ve cleaned up this site, and made this post. Perhaps more will follow.