So Fresh and So Clean: On Starting Over

A fire in a winter forest

It's wasn't all that bad was it?

I've grown a lot over seven years of blogging. Looking back it appears my first post was on June 5th of 2015, so seven years almost to the day. I've gone from using WordPress to Hugo to now using an actual build process over whatever it was I thought I was doing before. A portion of the content from the old blog is outdated, misguided, or just downright wrong. So to answer the question at hand, no, not all of it was that bad, but enough of it is so old or non-relevant anymore I don't want to keep it as primary content.

So why start over? Why not just remove/update posts?

Seven years... something about jubilee... starting over gives me the ability to curate the content that I want to migrate to the new site. I haven't completely wiped the content from the web - it will still be accessible in the Z-Nerd Archive, and hopefully if redirects work properly, all the search results should still forward to their appropriate article in the archive.

Maybe it's a bit of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" but that baby is a grown ass adult who doesn't shower, smokes pot, and eats ALL OF MY DAMN HOT POCKETS. Time to pay rent or get out. Sorry I failed you.

Between the pandemic, having a third kid, having a job that was 95% paperwork and 5% engineering, and looking longingly at my many other hobbies collecting dust, my brain just wasn't feeling the creative juices to create. Some people call it burn out. I call it... burn out. Apologies Adam Cook, you warned me and I didn't heed your sage advice and spent near two years recovering by eating potato chips and binge watching Tiger King fifteen times.

So what comes next?

Top priority is generating new content in the Azure, PowerShell, and device managability space. One post a year is just not enough for a community that has given so much to me already. I promise nothing except for glorious memes and maybe something to learn too.

As time allows, I'll pull some of my old content forward and update it to be relevant again. I know posts about the ConfigMgr AdminService, GUIs/PowerShell, and tools I've written still generate a decent bit of traffic, so I'll be focusing on those items first. Second to that, series that I still find relevant but never finished will be my second priority.

Why so serious? Where are the memes?

Here's to the future!

Elmo in front of Fire