Category: Site News

I started off this year with a small, simple personal blog on Blogger. I found myself writing more and using the blog as a replacement for my lack of social media. It was a place for my friends to keep up with what was going on, as well as a sounding board for all the weird stuff I wanted to share. After a few months, I grew frustrated with some technical mishaps occurring at Blogger and fueled by my desire to escape the Google eco-system as much as possible, I took my blog over to Write.as, where I rebranded it Brandon’s Journal and found a whole new audience of privacy conscious people who miss the internet of old pre-algorithms and sponsored posts. As much as I enjoy the community at Write.as, I found myself spending way too much time on Read.Write.as and well… I was taking in just as much negativity by reading some the personal blogs. So, I stopped. I pulled my blog off Read.Write.as as well. And for the last month or two, I’ve been back writing in my bubble which has been relaxing.

I recently moved over my horror website, Brandon’s Horror Review to a self-hosted WordPress. Google recently forced a new update with Blogger that I just cannot stand and it was time to allow that site to grow and breath. After a few days, I was thrilled at my progress and loved being back on WordPress. I decided then, that I would move Brandon’s Journal over to WordPress as well.

I hate to separate myself from the community over at Write.as, but I missed my sidebar. I think Write.as is a wonderful platform, but some of its limitations were just hindering how I wanted my site to grow. So, I’ve been porting everything over (which as not been an easy task), and I think I got the site 75% where I want it and that’s why I’m posting this today.

I do not have the time or the patience to figure out how to port my email and RSS subscribers to WordPress. I’m sure if you are like me, sometimes you rarely actually visit a website and just let your email/RSS readers do all the work. Well, if you like my content or want to continue keeping up with me, you’re going to have to re-subscribe. Just open up your browser and go to BrandonsJournal.com where you’ll find a Subscribe via Email feature and my RSS can be found at http://www.brandonsjournal.com/feed.

I appreciate all my readers and followers and hope you’ll continue to follow me on my new platform.

-Brandon

Five days ago, Blogger began having world-wide problems with their images. They just started disappearing and were replaced with a white box with a weird line through it. I first noticed it on my buddy Michael’s site, then this site, then my horror site. I gave it a couple days, figuring the problem with fix itself, but when it didn’t so I fixed a couple of posts and then went online for an answer.

I found no posts on reddit, no major articles on any tech sites, and was only able to find people complaining on the Blogger Community Help Forum after Googling “Blogger images” and then searching by date posted. As of today, the issue has been going on five days and the only response anyone has given is through elected community helpers, who say, “Blogger is aware of the issue and there is no ETA available on a fix.”

To say I’m frustrated would be an understatement.

Last month, I moved my horror site over to WordPress for a week, but I wasn’t happy with the themes I had at my disposal nor was I thrilled about some of the smaller intricacies (mainly spacing issues) that occur in WordPress. So, I gave it a good shot and once I realized I’d have to download and reupload all of my images again, I decided to just move it back to Blogger, where I was more comfortable and was extremely happy.

I like Blogger because it’s not super modern. It’s very much still a Web 1.0 type program and I love that about it. I’ m not a huge fan of how most modern blogs and websites work, and just prefer to have all my information at my fingertips in lieu of fancy designs that highlight single posts.

Despite all my frustration with Google, I still stomached it to use the program because of its ease of use and how much I enjoyed it, but I still have some fears that I believe are coming true. Google is known to axe products quickly. They’ve own Blogger for around 15 years and honestly, blogging isn’t what it used to be. Google has neglected Blogger (which is why it’s like a Web 1.0 program) for years and I’ve been waiting around for them to announce its closure. But then a few months ago, the Android App got a huge upgrade and I figured someone at Google must still care. So, I rested a little easier knowing that Blogger has a bit more life in it before it goes the way to Geocities, Friendster, Google Plus, MySpace, etc.

But now, I’m wondering if this is what does it in. Not having a fix or official announcement in five days is not good. Maybe it takes too much to fix this issue. Maybe Google doesn’t want to spend the time or man power in fixing something that doesn’t make them much money nor provide them a ton of statistics. I don’t know for sure, but I’m just saying, this doesn’t make me sleep easier at night knowing how much love and effort I’ve put into my blogs to know they could be wiped away in some cost saving measure.

So what is the solution? Well, I can wait this out and hope for the best or I can work on taking control of my site and moving it back over to WordPress. Of course, moving to WordPress has its problems too. Mainly, I’m not as happy with some of the way its set up and WordPress could always stop being developed (although I don’t see that for a very long time since a large percentage of the internet runs on WordPress). The only true way to preserve your websites and data is to go old school HTML/CSS, but that is just too much work. Maybe for a blog like this, but definitely not my horror site.

I don’t know. It’s taken the wind out of my wings a bit and I just don’t know how to proceed. I really hope Google gets it fixed, but I’m definitely a little gunshy about investing a ton of time into another blogger site.

Hello. My name is Brandon.

You may know me as the guy who has run a couple dozen blogs over the years, and hardly ever sticks with one more than a couple of months. I’m that guy who gets excited about an idea, does a ton of writing over a few days, sends out the link to my friends, and then I quit. I usually decide I’d rather write on paper or I’m being inauthentic, because I’m censoring myself for an audience. Then, I feel bad about wasting my friends time and I convince myself I’m a shirt writer and go back to doing nothing while shamefully hiding under the shadow of my tiny internet failure that no on truly cared about to begin with. How could they, I never really even started?

I think the problem was, blogging stopped being fun. It was something I just did when I was bored, lonely, or frustrated, and I did it more out of habit than I did out of enjoyment. I wasn’t proud of what I was writing and the different niches and angles that I approached didn’t keep my interest for very long. Writing became a chore and nothing you love should ever become that.

Writing wasn’t the only thing that became a chore. Reading certain books, video games, TV shows and movies also became tedious and unenjoyable. I’m not sure if my age finally caught up with me or if my interests changed, but I found myself in my mid-thirties questioning everything I once believed to be true. I realized that I was sort of on autopilot and I did things and kept up with things not out of passion and love, but out of habit. A great example would be NASCAR, a sport I haven’t watched in over fifteen years. Despite not watching NASCAR, nor caring for what the sport has become, I still checked in on NASCAR news almost daily. I still frequented racing forums and rumor sites. I wasted time every week staying in the know about something I didn’t even care for. Why? Because it’s what I’ve always done for the past twenty years and I think part of me loved being the guy who knows everything. So, I stayed up to date not so much for my own sake, but in case a random conversation about NASCAR happened, I could pitch in and discuss. Take a guess how many random NASCAR conversations have occurred in the last fifteen years? Yea… zero.

So, as 2020 approached, I decided I needed to break some of these habits and reset to zero. I started by removing everything off of my social media and then slowly adding only that which was important back. Then I started decluttering both in real life and digitally. I got rid of almost all of my DVDs, and gave up on TV shows and video games I was puttering through for years. I went online, found Wikis or season summaries, and just read how many of the TV shows that I was forcing myself to finish actually ended. This gave me a sense of completion and allowed me to move on from them.

Then right before the New Year, I decided to hop off social media so I could focus on some family issues, my mental health, and really determine what was important to me. I stopped writing and just lived, until today, the eighth of January, when my desire to express myself came full circle and this blog was born.