I wrote my first blog on July 30, 2007. It's hard to believe 15 years have past. For the most part I’ve written every Monday and during the times I’m in Ireland, I’ve written every day. Assuming I’ve written 50 weekly blogs a year, that’s 750, plus the approximately 14 blogs written in Ireland for 8 years (I started taking groups in 2012, but missed the past two years), that’s an additional 112, I’ve written approximately 862 blogs!
There are currently 273 blogs on my website. What happened to the others? The image above is of my first blog…How I got here. A few years before I began to blog, I started to develop my first website. As you all probably know, I’m a Mac user (always have been). I worked for Apple for 20 years before “retiring” in 2002 to begin my genealogical business. As the systems engineers that worked for me used to say…I know enough to be dangerous. Although I’m sort of techie, I was always in sales and marketing both at Apple and prior to that for 15 years at Xerox where I was on the Systems team selling the Xerox Star Workstation (the predecessor to the Lisa and Mac at Apple). The Xerox Star was one of the first graphical user interface machines which used a (3 button) mouse, but it was not a standalone device. It had to be connected by Ethernet to a file server and print server, so the first one was about $80,000 and then the add-ons were about $20,000 each. When I first saw the Lisa it was a $10,000 version of what I had been selling and I fell in love. Lucky for me, Apple was looking to start up a Business Sales Group and was hiring from companies like Xerox, IBM and DEC.
Back to my website. Apple bundled software with their computers in 2004 including iWeb and to paraphrase an old tag line…web design for the rest of us. With a name as unusual as Moughty, I was able to get the domain of moughty.com. Being sort of “techie” but having no sense of design, I just picked a template and started filling in my stuff. It worked and I used the software until Apple retired it in 2011.
Having to select another software package was difficult, but Sandvox offered an option for those of us moving from iWeb. The problem was there was no conversion. I picked a template close to what I had and started all over. By that time I had about 250 blogs, each of which had to be brought over to the new software manually, i.e., cut and paste. I didn’t bring over all of the blogs…some were outdated but I did bring over the majority and it was a time consuming job to get up and running.
So that took me to 2018 and Sandvox was not being updated. Although you can still go to their site and attempt to purchase the software, the last update to their website was in 2017. I had to go through the same process again, however I now had over 700 blogs. There was no way I was going to manually bring them over. I started looking at options, now mostly online…I still wanted something easy to use. I did a couple of trials and settled on Wix. It took me close to six months, but in January of 2019, I moved my site to IrishFamilyRoots.com. (I decided to keep moughty.com for a personal project.) I made the decision to only bring over one year of blogs (2018) plus those I discovered were referred to in currently blogs. I did bring over my first blog (which is how I know its date).
So what’s the future? I am presently going into a 2nd retirement mode. I am no longer lecturing or taking on new clients. I am still planning to host at least one more Research Trip to Ireland in 2023 and I do plan to continue blogging, albeit perhaps not every week. You may see more of my personal research, but always with a focus on methodology. Look at those blogs as case studies which might suggest new ways to look at your own research. When I see interesting tidbits, I’ll continue to post on my Donna Moughty Genealogy Facebook page, so “Like” that page to keep up with what’s new.
Thanks to those of you who have followed me through the years. This is definitely not goodbye. Continue to "Like" the blogs, provide comments and feedback and share with others that are interested in Irish Research.
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