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.

I need to figure out my sidewalk clearing plan. For now, ice-b-gone. ❄️

Genius Outsmarts Bank By Using Credit Card To Pay Off Other Credit Card - The Onion

At press time, sources reported that Garett had successfully cleared his debt in a feat of financial brilliance by canceling his credit card with a negative balance.

Life hack.

Trump Tells U.S. Treasury to Stop Minting Pennies - WSJ

In a post on the Musk-owned social-media site in January, DOGE said the penny “cost U.S. taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023.”

We probably have enough in circulation to meet demand for the time being, and one cent has lost all its value, but this is the natural consequence of monetary policy and inflation.

How Elon Musk Can Bring Air Traffic Under Control - WSJ Opinion

America’s air-traffic control system is decades behind those of Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy and the U.K. While these nations build safer, cheaper and more effective digital control towers that can be stationed off-site, the FAA continues to build the traditional towers of years past. While American control-tower staff share flight information with each other via paper flight strips, other countries use electronic flight strips with interactive displays and real-time data. Other providers subscribe to a global space-based surveillance system to track aircraft where there is no radar, such as over the oceans. The FAA doesn’t.

We literally invented aviation.

Decorating Valentine’s Day cookies. ❤️

I do not like weekends at the gym.

Introduction - Indie Microblogging

It’s time for a return to what made the web great. This book is about how. It’s both a history and a guide. How the web used to be, and how it should be again.

I’ve been thinking about, and working on, my website lately. Now seems like the right time to finally enjoy Manton’s book.

I ended up, painstakingly, moving the blog. I’m going to write up a longer post to memorize this big step because this is a watershed moment.

New shoes are fun. Grabbed them from a local, real life, shoe store.

Is it wrong to think that a chocolate flavored coffee is too chocolate-y?

☕️

I’m at an impasse.

The Catholic Husband blog is 12 years old with 1,000+ posts, but they’re locked into an arcane blogging system.

I don’t know if I should painstakingly move them one-by-one onto a new system or just accept that they’ll forever be trapped.

Bishop with shapes by Lucy.

FBI Agent On Remote Pacific Island Still Investigating January 6 Protesters - Babylon Bee

“I’ve got you now, Lectern Guy,” the as-yet unidentified agent was heard saying as he reviewed the terrifying moment when a lectern was moved twenty feet.

Man Who Drank Coffee And Ate Three Strips Of Bacon Ready To Take On The World - Babylon Bee

According to family members, David was running late for work so he skipped his usual breakfast of sugary cereal fortified with 27 vitamins and minerals. He even skipped his routine cup of healthy orange juice, which led to him ingesting this unusual concoction of caffeine and saturated fat which oddly seemed to power him up for the day.

Major Money Mistake: 5 Reasons Why Food Is The Worst Investment You Can Make - Clickhole

Food has lower return rates than stocks. If you bought Amazon stock in 2000, it’d be 9,000% more valuable today. If you bought dinner in 2000 instead? Odds are, that dinner is currently worth $0.

Who needs chairs?

Single Men Begin Dressing As Illegal Immigrants Hoping Kristi Noem Will Detain Them - Babylon Bee

“He almost got away with it,” said ICE agent Michael Oxner. “The hat, the mustache… that’s what they all look like. It was a foolproof disguise. Unfortunately for him, when our interpreter started to question him in Spanish, he could only respond with the words ‘taco,' ‘burrito,' and ‘chalupa.' That tipped us off. Turns out he only wanted to meet Kristi Noem.”

Volkswagen cancels ID.7 sedan for US - The Verge

But with the Trump administration expected to eliminate EV incentives, Volkswagen is scrapping its plans to bring the ID.7 to North America.

In other words, this is a product that is too expensive and can only be propped up with government support.

People don’t want EVs today, they might in the future, but not today. So maybe we should stop rolling out 7,000 new EV models every year.