Over the past two years, I’ve been studying, writing code, and developing concepts for the future blog, to replace that long-in-the-tooth blog with something much more modern, and using a code base that I would not have to maintain entirely myself.

The reality is maintaining blog code, all by oneself is a lot of work, especially if your not doing it professionally. While it gave me something to tinker with on the long winter nights, I simply got bored with updating, adjusting, and bug fixing code that could be done by others.

After doing some research into WordPress, I found it was a very flexible form of code, that could be easily extendable for my needs — including being able to be tied to a MySQL table with an indexed-geometry column, to allow very quick sorts by distance from a point. I could also easily tie in my existing maps and photos, into the code, by writing a custom plug-in, and using shortcodes.

So welcome to the new blog!