Where to begin?

I wasn’t sure how to start out the first “real” post to my personal blog, but the subject presented itself nicely when I started going through the old Tudor History site "updates" pages to add to the main site blog. What a trip down memory lane. The first “What’s New” pages I had were from the July 1997, when I moved my Tudor History site to the old tudor.simplenet.com address from the machine that was on my desk at work.

It’s been interesting to see the progress (and lack thereof) that I’ve made on the Tudor History site over the years. It has existed in some form or another for ten years now, so I feel that I should be much farther along the path of where I want to go by now. But then I stop and think about the various changes that have taken place in my life, particularly over the past five years, and I get more realistic.

It’s been interesting to see the record of how many coughs and colds I’ve had through the years (and those are just the ones I complained about in the updates), but that is one of the hazards of working at a university with 50,000 people from all over the world crammed into a relatively small area. Not to mention interacting with the public and school kids as part of the outreach stuff I do at work. I’m constantly coming into contact with new germ sources! And, for the record (although I didn’t mention it on the main site blog) I’ve already had my first cold of this semester.

I thought I had spewed more about my big burnout stretch in 2001, but I guess I did it through email instead of the site updates. I wasn’t treating the update page as a journal (or blog, before a lot of people even knew what one was) that much then, so I didn’t elaborate too much. It was a pretty rough time for lots of reasons, and I have to admit that quite a bit of it came from running the Tudor History site and Tudor Talk. I had a bad confluence of getting a nasty-gram from the National Portrait Gallery (long story), someone trying to take over the email list, and getting some really hurtful emails about the site. I really shouldn’t let the latter get to me, but sometimes it is hard not to. Especially when it comes with the other stuff and while I was taking a very tough class, which was leaving me pretty tired. And little did I know that would only be the beginning of how tired I would be for the rest of the year…

Obviously at some point I managed to shake off the burnout and started to devote more time to the Tudor site again. Last year I finally uploaded the new design with the new front page and a consistent design through the content pages. I have already decided to redo some of it again, but in a way that I think will make the information more accessible. I also need to go through and add the search link to all the pages, but that’s going to take a while!

Well, I think I’ll close out this first post here. Expect more nonsensical ramblings soon!

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