Everywhere I go, there I am

Oh, this poor website. I registered the domain in 2011 and it has consistently been neglected in a corner while I worked on other things. Most recently, it has been hidden behind a maintenance page for 3 or so years while I figured out what (if anything) to do with all my various web properties and their content.

I’ve never been great at just blogging about whatever. When I think back over more than 20 years of sharing random tidbits of life on the internet, it’s clear I do better when I have a specific topic or area of focus. However, I typically only maintain interest in that topic/area for a few years before I get bored or annoyed and move to the next thing.

So I’ve been hard at work over here for the past few months, in hopes of creating a long-term home for myself and whatever I decide to say or write:

• I put together a theme that is completely unlike anything I’ve ever built for myself – I typically shun quiet and feminine in favor of bold and bright, but this time I decided to calm things down a little.
• I moved over some ancient content from my previous business site that still does well in search, mostly because I didn’t want people to think I fell off the internet, but there won’t be anything new added there.
• I’m offering no services and making no promises, though I can’t say how that will play out long term. I’m not used to having a website/blog just hanging out with no real goal in mind.
• I updated roughly 3 billion logins to change my email address so I can let my old business site’s domain expire next year.

So now what?

That’s the all-important question, isn’t it? At this moment, I’m thinking I might post some ramblings about the dogs’ website/business and my progress on that front, since it’s really the only interesting thing I’m doing right now outside of work.

I feel a surprising amount of pressure (all self-inflicted, of course) now that I’m using my actual domain. People visiting whoever dot com likely expect to learn something about the whoever involved, and as I age I find myself slightly less willing to put my life story out there for the world to see and (let’s be honest) judge. But I’m also eager to be known and/or remembered for who I am, not what I do, and the only way to do that is to share more of who I am and less of what I do.

The first post has always been awkward and this one is no exception. For now I’m just going to be glad I got it done, and the rest is for Future Andrea to decide. (Future Andrea gets stuck with all sorts of unpleasant tasks, bless her.)