Site maintenance meanders down memory lane

Somewhere between October 2017 and January 2017, I moved this blog from WordPress.com to a hosted WordPress site, which is where you are at right now. I don’t remember the exact date this transition took place, but I did it in order to have more control and consolidate a few things (you can read more about that on-going battle here).

Since the transition, I have been slowly making adjustments and changes to this site in order to make it exactly the way I want. I’m not done, and I question if I will ever be truly satisfied. However, I finally tackled one of the largest tasks I had been avoiding doing: cleaning up my categories.

The categories are an organizational tool. The categories serve as defining the types of posts on this site. Some are personal, some are education focused, and some are journalism orientated. I felt I had too many categories, many of which could be combined and streamlined. Of the nearly 700 posts on this site, it was a big job. I finally finished that today . . . at least for now. I got it down to six categories with four sub-categories under under one of them. I still feel I might do more condensing in the future, but, for now, I am satisfied.

Of course, the point of this isn’t to tell you I changed how my posts are organized. No. Instead, I just wanted to share how interesting it was to read some of my postings from years back.

It was interesting to see how my opinions and views on various topics have changed during the course of time. In fact, armed with my current beliefs, some of the posts were extremely out of date or almost cringe-worthy to me. It crossed my mind to just delete those, but that would feel dishonest. Those were my thoughts and opinions at the time, so they deserve to remain on this site. It is just interesting how much I’ve changed. I kind of knew it was happening, but reading my own words really drove the point home. Plus, it was fun just to remember all I have experienced and shared via my blog.

Now, I did delete a few posts, but those got axed only because they were sparse spots revolving around links to content from other sites that no longer existed. Those were worthless and could not be salvaged.

Moving forward, I still need to go through and fix links to my own content. I often link to other posts I have written, but in the transition, a lot of those links still point to the WordPress.com site. That’s no good. Also, a lot of the photos I took and published in my posts are no longer there. I either need to re-upload them if I can find the original images or remove the broken images from the posts.

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About toddvogts 833 Articles
Todd R. Vogts, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of media at Sterling College in Kansas. Previously, he taught yearbook, newspaper, newsmagazine, and online journalism in various Kansas high schools, and he ran a weekly newspaper in rural Kansas. He continues to freelance as a professional journalist from time to time. Also, Vogts is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the Journalism Education Association (JEA), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), among others. He earned his Master Journalism Educator (MJE) certification from JEA in 2022. When he’s not teaching or writing, he runs his mobile disk jockey service and takes part in other entrepreneurial ventures. He can be reached at twitter.com/toddvogts or via his website at www.toddvogts.com.