Like Lazarus (or a Fine Germanic Monster) It's Alive, Again!

Welcome to the blog - or is it back to the blog? - for www.douglasjlane.com.

No, no - you're not crazy. It used to be on the website. It had thoughts on a call-to-violence t-shirt, a meditation on the loss of handwritten letters, a call-to-action regarding two diaries found in a used bookstore. You didn't imagine those. The index looked like this (thanks, Internet Wayback Machine!)

But the blog on the site wasn't built of blog tools. It was manually cobbled together from functional parts to create a blog-like form. And it was stupidly cumbersome, because my website development software did everything I needed at the time except blog integration (and working on an Apple, as I have since I started computing, my options were limited when Apple scrapped its own web page builder.) Every entry I did required creation and formatting of its own page, plus revising an index page for the new post, linking it all, and then loading the site to the ISP. 

All for a blog post. I'm lucky there were any posts. It was such a PITA, it made me not want to blog, which is the exact opposite desired outcome of having one, so I scrapped the the whole thing. 

And then my site development software providers decided they were finally going to add blog integration - but like a good 21st century software company, they a) made it a feature you had to upgrade for (even with a previously paid license), and b) wanted either $80 one time for the privilege, or wanted me to enter into a monthly subscription. Um... no.

So I blew the dust off Blogger (which had homed two previous short-lived blogs over the years for me), put a button on the website's home page and hyperlinked the 'BLOG' control in the header menu, et voila: something I can point visitors to that I might actually want to use for quick turn-around or longer-form thoughts without spending two days tinkering under the hood of the website.

The resurrection of the blog is part of an overall push to make the site and the web presence something more than it's been, where I'm updating more than once every eight months. The e-commerce is being beefed up to make buying my publications easier and less convoluted, and will let me also sell some used books along the way without eBay taking 14% for my efforts. And the idea is to provide it as a better landing point as I shift social media focus to helping direct people to content they might want to linger over outside the ad-pummeling, sell-your-data zone. 

The old posts are archived somewhere on this laptop. At least one will be revisited soon because the story it began has a great conclusion. I may restore the others, I may plunder their ideas for new, better posts, or I may just keeping running forward, waving my arms in the air to stir new air.

Whichever way it plays, welcome back. I hope I'll see you around.