Stumbling Through the Past Relaunch!

Ta-dah! Welcome to my new-look blog!

So much has happened since I last posted regularly such as the Black Summer bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. While all this was going on, like most people I also had a lot going on in my personal life. We moved twice in two years during the pandemic including moving from Sydney and landing in Melbourne just a couple of weeks before that loooong lockdown of 2020. Coincidental with the pandemic and unrelated to it, sadly a few people close to us died. It has been a tough few years for everyone and I am sure you have a story or two about your travails over the last few years.

Another impediment to me posting regularly was the design of my blog. It was sadly dated and needed a big overhaul. I have written over 250 posts and pages so every time I looked at it I became stressed because I knew it was a big job to fix it.

Well here we are! I have done the work and now can feel the joy of writing for it again. I have moved the blog away from WordPress.com which gives me a lot more flexibility to design this website the way I want it and to add functionality. What does that mean for you?

Stumbling Through the Past has a new email newsletter that you can subscribe to. This newsletter will be emailed to subscribers each time a new post is published and will include:

• A quick overview of the new post
• Highlight some old, but still good posts
• Added extras for subscribers only including back stories about various posts, occasional meetups for subscribers and more.

How can you subscribe? Click the subscribe button below and fill in your details in the form.

I am going to shutdown the link with WordPress.com permanently, so if you are one of the many readers who have subscribed to this blog via the WordPress.com reader or for direct email notifications, you need to resubscribe via the button above now. I could just transfer your details over to my new subscriber list but I want to adopt the highest standards regarding consent and privacy. You may have subscribed to this blog quite a few years ago and so I am not regarding yo consent as current which is why you need to resubscribe. Thank you so much for your support over the years!

In other news, I have decided to be explicit about my moderation policy. As everyone has noticed, sadly our public debate has deteriorated. Another thing that was deterring me from posting was dealing some comments that did not meet my assumed standards for conversation on this blog. In fairness, I had not been explicit about my moderation policies and some of these commenters had posted in good faith not knowing what my standards are. I have rectified this now. Please read my moderation policy. I am also considering not allowing comments on those posts that could elicit particularly polarised comments. I still want to default to open comments so hopefully I won’t feel the need to do this often, if at all.

I have made myself a blogging schedule and outlined five posts to be published over the next few months. I will be posting again on 22^nd August which is this Monday. Why this date? 22^nd August marks the 12^th anniversary of this blog. I hope you will come by this blog again on that day.