I started publishing on my other blog, Catholic Husband, in 2013. Since then, I’ve published regularly and have ended up with a collection of over 1,000 blog posts. 2013 was the golden age of blogging, and I spent considerable time designing the website in Rapidweaver.

Running your website requires many choices, the most important of which is the platform on which you build. Users who build their online identity on Facebook, Twitter, or even MySpace found themselves at the mercy of the platform rules. The content is locked away forever and almost impossible to unlock. A similar problem can arise when building your site.

We can never know who will be the winners and losers in the future. I chose to run all of Catholic Husband through Rapidweaver and its built-in blog plugin. It was a good choice at the time, but as the years passed, fewer Rapidweaver users used the blog plug-in. The product kept improving, but the blog plug-in ended up frozen in time. Updates slowed to a trickle, with the last major improvement coming in 2018. Realmac Software, the developer of Rapidweaver, doesn’t even use their own blogging solution for the company blog.

Recently, I wanted to change the design of the site in Rapidweaver, but I had to use pre-built themes for them to work on the blog. Themes were everything in 2013 and 2014, but in the last few years, everyone has moved to frameworks and modular design. I couldn’t make any of the themes still available work the way that I wanted.

So this left me at an impasse. Web technologies change constantly, and improvements were out there, ready to be had. All the while, Catholic Husband was locked away. What kept me locked in to Rapidweaver was the difficulty of exporting all those posts, the challenge of redirecting old links (Rapidweaver doesn’t use a standard nomenclature for the blog plug-in), and the belief that a fix was coming.

In the end, I concluded that I might be the most prolific active user of the Rapidweaver blog plug-in, and updates weren’t coming. I also came to terms with the reality that coming up with redirect rules for over 1,000 posts was more work than it was worth.

Catholic Husband is a substantial part of my writing portfolio, and I wanted to break it free. I spun up a blog on Micro.blog, tweaked the design using CSS, and updated the catholichusband.com DNS records to point to its new home.

Over three days last week, I re-posted all 1,015 blog posts, giving them not just a new home, but a new portable URL using a standard naming convention. It was a lot of work, and it was tedious, but now it is done.

My writing now has a new, modern home. I have access to the latest standards and technologies, the site is incredibly fast, and there’s even a built-in search function that Catholic Husband for the first time. To top it all off, there’s a native subscribe capability that lets readers get updates via email without having to rely on the unreliability of Mailchimp.

This was a project worth my time and effort. Catholic Husband is free, and ready to move forward on the modern web as a growing collection of my thoughts and experiences, in a way that’s built to last.