I have had that since 2005, but I haven’t used it regularly since I adopted andyarthur.org as my primary domain in spring of 2008. While I occasionally get emails to that old domain, it’s not worth it with inflation raising the cost of keeping each domain to $21 a year. I will keep andyarthur.org and andyarthur.com which will work for email and visiting the blog. I doubt many people even know about the old domain.

I thought about ending the blog all together, as this year with rising costs the price goes up to $540 for three years of the hosting due the end of October, plus another $21 a year each domain in April and mayTfor the two domains I own. But then again, I like doing my blog and it works out to all of 55 cents a day. I don’t have the fanciest hosting service ever, but it works reliably most of the time and I’ve been happy with the servers which have been reliable except for a short while during the pandemic when everything was crashing on the Internet. Once I bite the bullet and renew the hosting contract it will be good until the end of October 2026 bar the cost of domains.

Sure it’s a lot of money to keep the blog running — but it’s something I like to do. Other social media services are free, but I don’t have the control over the content and presentation that I have on my blog. I pretty much have full control over my blog, and it’s free of advertising. I served out over 2.5 million web pages on the blog in the month of August, though it was only to 35,000 unique visitors. Still that’s nothing to sneeze at. I frequently run into people in the woods who have read my blog and used one of the maps. I know I probably could make money selling maps or other stuff, but it’s really just for fun.

Despite what I often think, I’m not really struggling for money. My salary is good, despite choosing to forgo many luxuries in favor of saving for a better future. I am frugal but I like my toys. My blog is one of my toys, which turned 22 years old this year — when I graduated from high school in 2001 — first a Geocities site, then a site hosted on a college platform, then I had another place host it, then it came on being fully on it’s own as the hosted blog in 2005. So depending on how you look at it, I’ve been doing it for more then two decades or most of my adult life.

I am sure there are many who say my life would be better off if I got rid of my blog, stopped telling the world about my views on things. Often silence is best, especially if you want those high-ranking positions. But I really don’t. I am happier being me. Delivering real results for my clients, even if some of the things I say on my blog doesn’t always make them agree with me personally. I want to be somebody who isn’t afraid to share his thoughts on the world around me.

Moreover, I have learned many important skills with the blog, like GIS mapping and data analysis which I probably wouldn’t have for not the blog. The blog gives me a real world sand box to play with, learn web, mapping and GIS technologies, which are real marketable skills that I might some say really use in the real world. Plus owning your own name as domain name is great because it can become an online resume or business, besides being a portfolio as it currently is used.