New year, New domain!
Now announcing a new site address: Unknownreilly.com!
I felt it was time for a change, being the new year. This has been something that I have been considering for six months, but I was hoping that the old site address theunknownreilly.wordpress.com would do… However, my needs have changed.
Song of the post: You ain’t seen Nothing yet by Bachman-Turner Overdrive
It’s time for me to commit to a domain website instead of one hosted a subdomain under WordPress.
I’m doing this because I feel that I hit a wall with the old host. The free plan that I had was limited by design not to be the best website it could be. Therefore, I’m going up one step to the WordPress Personal Plan. Considering that this blog is still a hobby, unlikely to be my primary source of income, and I don’t want to blog full time as a job, the $80 per year is reasonable.
This plan is $48 a year before taxes, but I bought a domain name before buying the program without knowing WordPress requires a plan to change domain names. Que sera, sera.
Making a living blogging or writing, or the minimum wage is incredibly and statistically unrealistic. Making a living writing or in the arts is hard. I’m not against hard goals. If were to shoot for a difficult goal, it would be to become a showrunner or, to be a novelist who has their work adapted into an animated tv show or movie. (animated because I love anime and animated tv shows and movies.) Most creative people have a day job and create on the side like I do.
Maybe it’s time I start to consider working towards the goal above seriously. It’s been something that I have had to drop for years because I was living in survival mode and because I had to go through the slow process of healing my mental health. I digress.
This is an investment in myself. However I go forward, the first step is by improving this blog. The skills and time I’ve spent writing and learning about SEO and blogging will help me in all aspects of life moving forward.
More changes to come
I plan on making more changes such as a theme change for the front page, which is something that I’ve thought about doing for a couple months but wasn’t sure what I wanted, or what would better fit this type of blog. I’d prefer not to have to pay for this.
One thing that I would like to change is the posting schedule. In 2022 it was, frankly speaking, random. I wrote when I could, procrastination was part, and I had to focus on self-care because of my health. It was a busy year of change too, which required more rest. For now, I feel that the content schedule I would prefer to be Monday and Thursday.
How can I achieve these changes?
The Screenshot above is of the 2022 total app use by me, tracked by Stay Free app. In 2022, I spent 2516 hours on my phone—an average of 6.9 hours daily. While a large chunk of this time is due to me watching videos on YouTube or movies on Amazon prime while working, a significant share is not. It’s time I could have used doing something else.
That being said, I could have written more or been more disciplined. I like to watch anime or animated tv shows after getting home from work, and pretty much watch tv shows or movies on the weekend… But it’s time for a change.
Experience from past failures has taught me that incremental progress and doing things imperfectly are how I grow. I get in my head too much and rationalize why not to do stuff instead of being okay with being “good enough.” I grow by doing.
The only way I can improve is by investing more time into it.
I have three planned posts coming up. First on how the blog performed, second on how my life was in 2022, and third, on the finale of the fantasy football series. I discovered that I like this type of analytic stuff last year.
I want this blog to grow and I want to grow as a writer. This is a step forward. Onto 2023! Onto Year three of blogging!
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