If you visit this page occasionally, you’ve noticed that this blog sometimes doesn’t get updated for weeks at a time. Perhaps you’d like to know why that’s the case.
I know there are people who live for their blogs. One can picture the dedicated blogger, pajama-clad till mid-afternoon, religiously pounding away at the keyboard in the fervent belief that the cyberworld awaits his latest mind dump with bated breath. But that’s not who we are. We’re under no illusions about the size of our audience or its eagerness to absorb what we have to say. (Google Analytics makes that clear enough.) So we aren’t under constraint to provide something novel every day, or even every week.
But that’s not the main reason our blog is relatively static. The main reason we don’t update it regularly is, frankly, that we have too much else to do. Here’s a rundown:
We manage and regularly update a group of web sites — those of several churches, a missionary in India, our local library and Chamber of Commerce, our personal ministry and publishing activities, our family, our poetry magazine, and our railroad hobby interest. All told, we’re responsible for maintaining 29 web sites if you count all the separate components of our Rail Archive. All these web sites are linked at our server operation site, ForeCyte.com. If our blog isn’t regularly updated, these other sites are.
Servicing the church-related sites involves formatting weekly sermons, updating monthly calendars, formatting and posting monthly newsletters and semi-monthly missionary reports, and regularly revising other material. On our ministry site, Laudemont Ministries, we’re currently adding some of my older sermons my wife is transcribing from cassette tapes. Our Rail Archive regularly gets augmented with new photos, either those I have taken or those other rail hobbyists send me, plus supporting commentary. Recently I’ve been posting my railroad photos not included in the Rail Archive to another site, the NERAIL North American Railroad Photo Archive.
Obviously a good deal of graphic work is involved with all these sites, for which we use Paint Shop Pro 7. We build all our sites in straight HTML; we don’t use any third-party software except the one for this blog, which we have modified to fit into this page.
I also publish WestWard Quarterly, the poetry magazine edited by my wife, Shirley Anne. I work with her in producing each issue, which we print at home on our own equipment. In January I took delivery of my third novel, New America, which I formatted for publication myself including the cover design; now I’m involved in distributing it.
I just completed a two-year term as a trustee of our local library, and two years as a director of the Greater Kirkland Area Chamber of Commerce.
In addition to all that, we’re getting ready to relocate to Hamilton, Illinois in June, sifting through our possessions to trim down for the move and trying to sell our home here in Kirkland.
We believe what we post on this blog is interesting and thought-provoking material, and appreciate those of you who read it. But if this blog doesn’t get updated for a while, you know the reasons why.
