I’ve been totally delinquent about blogging in recent years. I’m not sure why. One theory is that the way we’ve been learning has changed. It’s hard to describe, exactly, but it’s like we’ve left behind our period of beginner gains where it felt like every ride was revelatory in some way. We’re still learning. A ton. But the gains are harder to quantify and harder to write about. I had a period of time where I felt everything I tried to say was taken and twisted into something I never meant. And this eventually made me reluctant to even post.
Another theory is that blogging in general has become a bit old-school. Instagram and Facebook have largely replaced long-form style posting of personal content on a private domain.
Yet another possibility is life has been pretty steady lately. With less change, there’s less news. Posting about the same stuff over and over can start to feel redundant.
I’m not sure which of these is the primary reason. Most likely it’s a combination of all three. In any case, I’m getting frustrating with the aggressive ads on Instagram lately, I more or less quit Facebook over a year ago, and Twitter has never managed to feel like my style. With none of those platforms serving to connect me to anyone, I find myself missing the community of bloggers I once interacted with all the time.
When I got sick a few weeks ago, I decided the thing to do in my convalescence was tackle the massive project of moving my blog and Brian’s blog off of Blogger and into one comprehensive WordPress install. This meant combining over 1000 posts and multitudes of images onto one domain, and then finding a way to mesh them together along with an active feed of my Instagram gallery. I wanted to do this because it’s been bugging for a while that my posts and images were hosted on severs I had no direct access to or control over. Still, the reason I never did it before was because the project basically amounted to me laboring away for hours upon hours, while massively ill, to create a brand new platform for two blogs that have been mostly dormant for years.
So yeah. It wasn’t necessarily a rational move. It took a very long time. And I’m not done. What’s live now on amatuervaquero.com is the bones of the endeavor. I’m still planning to flesh out an area to make access to the archives easier, with navigation by date, category, tag, and author. I’m going to make it visually obvious which posts are mine and which are Brian’s. I’ve got some planned static content to add, plus lots and lots of details to clear up.
But there’s time for all that later. In the meantime, I’m hoping to return to posting with more regularity. My goal for the year is one post a month. Modest. But hopefully doable. 🙂
For now, old feeds and urls should pointing to new content. But here’s a little list of helpful links.
- Robin’s full archives
- Brian’s full archives
- feed of all posts
- feed of just Instagram posts
- feed of just Robin’s posts
- feed of just Brian’s posts
Anyway, that’s all for now. Here’s a photo from the weekend. Laredo was taking a long time to eat his post-ride snack, so I hopped on Steen to tool around bareback for a while.
