11 Feb 2018

Happy Birthday Yow Yow!

A few days ago, I turned Yow Yow! off to give it a bit of a face lift. I didn’t think anyone would notice since we’ve been a relatively quiet blog for the last few years. The blog was down for less than a week and even though we’ve been gone for much longer periods of time, it was still a weird feeling. I would come home after work and all I could do was just consume content. I didn’t have a place to share it and I didn’t want to mess with the migration that was being done so I just stayed quiet. There was a part of this process that was so freeing. What if I just didn’t have Yow Yow! and I had a normal life where this wasn’t sometimes my hobby or “double life?” I think about this retiring moment often and obviously, this isn’t it today, but I often think about how hard it will be to let go.

So what happened to Yow Yow! while we were down? I hired a freelancer (the first person I’ve ever hired to help me with Yow Yow!) She migrated my blog to WordPress.org, got a new host, added a new theme, and I spent hours pouring over the details and losing sleep about how the migration wasn’t perfect. Wondered how long it would take me to go back and edit nine years of posts to make it look like I never migrated at all. I knew that giving this up was going to be the hardest moment for me some day down the line because one of the first instructions I gave to Addie was – “Please make sure all nine years comes over with me.”

The why: I wanted a reason to celebrate nine years. I also knew that it was time to make a change. There was a place that I wanted to get to with Yow Yow! and I haven’t gotten there yet. I knew that I couldn’t get there if I stayed with my original. This wasn’t the first time we’ve changed themes; this is the third. This isn’t the first time we’ve tried a migration before. Last year, I tried to move everything over to Squarespace and then of course, when it wasn’t perfect, I abandoned the move and immediately went back to blogging on WordPress.com again. If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that you REALLY can’t go back and change the past. When you make a decision to move, you have to start from there and only go forward. I’ve gone back six pages to edit posts and maybe I’ll continue to edit, but the more time I spend doing that, the less posts we’ll have for the present.

Despite all the stress, I really am happy with the outcome. Addie did a wonderful job. There will be things that will bother me about our new home, but ultimately, it is exactly what I wanted. A cleaner look, a better focus, and a space for me to still write down all of my words. Thank you to the many friends that reached out to me during this process who expressed excitement at the new Yow Yow! and the ones that lended an ear when I was trying to balance this AND work last week. Everyone’s support is what keeps this blog alive. Let’s get to Year 10.

Posted on February 11, in Life