Summary: If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here I've been quiet too long. And I apologize. It's not that I don't have stuff for you - I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren't you? Good.) Because I do this all for you. What's happened that I don't want you to fall into.I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn't always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I'd been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct. Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn't be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) - this pulled it down below 3,000. Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn't assigned a category and put these where they belonged. Moving back to Wordpress off BloggerI've always liked Wordpress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend. Wordpress.com was one of these. I've had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won't tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer - hope you're not using your real name...) Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) - I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger. And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than Wordpress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn't keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it. Blogger has one major drawback - it doesn't have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a Wordpress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is "uncategorized." Then the fun begins. (I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it's possible to turn tags ["labels" on Blogger] into categories. And then within Wordpress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.) Since "uncategorized" is a default on Wordpress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one. It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.) And Just When I Thought I Was Done......I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes. Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don't use that word often, it means a lot. I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.) Unfortunately, it isn't really like Blogger or Wordpress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It's way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course - the ability to directly sell digital products. I'm getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what's coming up. Because I've got a lot of work to do - still - just to help you get the data you want the way you want it. The problem is that it's going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit. There's no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point. The Grand Design Revealed...drumroll, please. You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That's my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it. This site will really be in four parts, which is how I've or
