I don’t even really know where to begin. It’s been so long since my brog was back online, and I’d grown used to the fact that I no longer had it, that I’m blanking on what to write now that it’s really up and running again.
The last time my brog was online, I was writing about the absurdity of Cody sleeping on a waterbed inside of his van in Wisconsin on Step-by-Step, and the country was ridiculing the idea that an orange baked potato was claiming to be running for president.
Now I’ve got a wife and an infant child, that orange baked potato is actually the president, and the country that ridiculed him has been brought to its knees by a global pandemic.
Crazy how much things can change in four years.
The thing is, throughout all the time in which I had no brog, I did not stop writing, and I continued to write as if my brog were going to be back up in four days and not four years. Sure, it was disheartening and frustrating at times, since to me, my site was always more like the mouth my words and thoughts came from and how I primarily expressed myself, as opposed to the real mouth I have which is mostly where junk food is shoveled into, but ultimately the writing itself was the more important thing that I made sure to continue doing, because writing is my hobby and passion, and no matter if six people read my nonsense or zero, it was still very important to me that I did it anyway.
Once my brother was able to get my site back up online, it turns out that over the last four years, WordPress has surely made some strides, and all my old content was far too back in time for any sort of WP app or extension could successfully migrate all my old content into the present day dynamically.
So whereas I could’ve just punted on all the old stuff, and start anew, that obviously is not how a nostalgic empath like me does things, so in a true labor of love, I went back in time, and manually backed each and every single brog post from February 2010 through April 2016 (1,621 posts), merged them with the queue of posts that I’d written offline (813 posts), and then one-by-one, post at a time, retroactively re-published each and every single one of them in chronological order, which brings us back into the present, where I have literally ten years worth of brog posts back up and online, for basically nobody’s satisfaction except my own.
Not that it really changes anything, but I also took this as an opportunity to integrate and utilize tagging, and if anything at all, I can see trends of the things that I gravitate towards writing about, even if I didn’t notice them back then.
It took 57 days to back up and repost all of the old brog’s content, in its (mostly) unedited and original words, regardless of if they were good, bad, fluffy, controversial, or things that I regret putting in writing, but we’ll touch on that later. And then another 25 days to publish all of the “new” stuff, all in between the windows of time in which my infant child was sleeping, because ain’t nobody got time to do anything else when baby is awake.
But for all intents and purposes, my site is back. After this much time, I can hardly believe it, but it’s up and online, and hopefully not going anywhere again any time soon. As the dust settles, it’s my aspirations to get back to more of a normalized writing schedule, and before you know it, this’ll be a place to get opinionated commentary on the rigors of new fatherhood, on top of a lot of the old tropes and trends of things that I enjoyed writing about, like professional wrestling, the fuck-ups of Atlanta and Georgia, and other random topics, but also the likely observations and tribulations that I’ll inevitably go through in my journey into fatherhood.
