It seems that another era at Club Josh will be coming to an end. The five of you that still look at this site have noticed that I haven’t blogged in a long time as my attention as been distracted by Instagram and Twitter. I’ve been struggling to redesign this site for years and now it seems that my hand will be forced by my hosting company.
A little over a year ago, I found out that the server I was on was old and outdated and the nice folks at Joynet offered to move my site to a newer server capable of running the latest WordPress or Movable Type site. I was able to move my files over until I got to the Gorn Page and realized that it would take a huge effort to re-build that site as the software I use for the image galleries needed a big upgrade as well.
Life has a way of getting in the way of my site more and more, so the new site turned into just trying to get the old site running on the new server. For years, I’ve just struggled as to where to take my site. Do I return to a smaller, simpler 1995 era site with just a few pages of interest, or do I make the jump and put the site fully into a CMS that I can change the theme whenever it suits me.
I guess that the big problem is that my site is really a collection of smaller sites: Daily Update, The Gorn Page, Trip Diaries, and then some random misc pages held over from my original sites back in the 1990s.
Flash forward to August 2012 and I received a notice that my server will go away at the end of October, despite my purchase of a Mixed Grill “lifetime” account. Now as I fire away an email asking for a full refund of my purchase price, the reality is I need to sit down and figure out what I want to do with the site. Just a few years ago, the thought of just walking away from Club Josh was never a thought and I often mused that it would outlast my own life. Now, I must think of what I want my Internet presence to be (if anything).
I think a new site will be here soon. It will be leaner, more up to date, and hopefully be able to contain my microblogging feeds from Twitter and Instagram. Or shoot, maybe everything is just posted here and then fed to the other services..
At any rate, if you know of a good hosting provider let me know!