First of all, if you’ve been getting a lot of emails from this website within the last two weeks, it’s because I’ve been updating my posts with new image links out to Fine Art America while removing the NextGEN Pro plugin embeds and I learned from reading WordPress.com’s documentation that making these posts private then public again after making the changes would send out an email like writing a new post. I have about ten posts left to update but I’ll hold off on those until next week and maybe only do three post updates per week until I have finished. Feel free to delete any emails you’ve received if you have already read that post title in the past. There isn’t an easy way of disabling the emailing system except for exporting my subscribers list as a backup and then deleting all of them. I’d rather let you know what to expect.

Meanwhile, I thought to open a Substack and had to clean up the import one-by-one which wasn’t too efficient. Not sure why they have programmed their site in that way. I opened a Substack account about four months ago and was undecided about using it. I wanted to separate the photography from the technical posts between email lists. I haven’t found a good solution (without plugins) to separate out and automate two separate lists of posts based on categories. I’m aware of MailChimp since its infancy but I haven’t looked at how to go about it with this site except that it might have something to do with category RSS feeds. I also noticed that Substack and Stripe combined took $7 from a $50 donation so I adjusted the yearly paywall cost to compensate for that. I’ve discovered that WordPress.com provides a paywall system of sorts but it’s limited in features. So, I’m undecided at the moment.

I haven’t written much in a while since moving this website to WordPress.com from DigitalOcean. I am liking the lack of complexity to get a post into the site through the laptop and saving idea drafts through the Jetpack mobile app. I decided to stop creating WordPress themes from scratch but continue to manage the WordPress sites that I have partnerships with. I can’t see myself leaving WordPress anytime soon when it’s Graphical User Interface (GUI or “Guu-E”) is so helpful to writing and inserting images. The new block editor has made creating a website, using a WordPress theme with block editor support, much easier than writing custom code. I especially like the block editor combined with the Astra theme or WordPress Twenty Twenty-Three’s theme with block editor support.

And I’ve been writing less because I’ve been more curious about lawnmower repair and selling those that I’ve fixed up. In addition, I’m learning to create an app with Flutter (multi-platform language) and considering Swift language for iOS and Kotlin language for Android to build native mobile apps. And I’m hoping to visit a few 18th-century reenactments this year for photo trips.