This you knows.
The years travel fast.
And time after time I’ve done the Tell.
But this ain’t one body’s Tell.
It’s the Tell of us all.
And you got to listen it and ‘member.
‘Cause what you hears today, you got to tell the newborn tomorrow.I’s looking behind us now, into history back.
I sees those of us that got the luck and started the haul for home.It lead us here and we was heartful ’cause we seen what there once was. One look, and we knewed we’d got it straight. Those what had gone before had knowing of things beyond our reckoning…even beyond our dreaming.
Time counts and keeps counting.
And we knows now…finding the trick of what’s been and lost ain’t no easy ride. But that’s our track. We got to travel it.
And there ain’t nobody knows where it’s gonna lead.
Still and all, every night we does the Tell so that we ‘member who we was and where we came from. But most of all we ‘members the man who finded us…him that came the salvage. And we lights the city. Not just for him but for all of them that are still out there.
‘Cause we knows there’ll come a night when they sees the distant light…and they’ll be coming home.
Savannah Nix — “Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome”
Over 17 years ago, I started posting a boatload of pictures and stories to my personal domain/website to share the our family adventures and the general mayhem of trying to keep up with three kids. And there’s certainly been plenty of excitement in that time…lots of laughs, lots of tears, a fair heap of love.
But the idea was to have a record of the kids growing up as well as provide a way for family far away to be able to share in their adventures.
One person in particular was certainly the primary audience for a website that would ultimately go through at least four template/framework iterations and become a behemoth weighing in at over 65GB which is massively huge for any website!
And then almost five years ago, he passed away and in the years following I’d promise myself I’d get back to blogging only for me to sit at the keyboard fighting the mental block. Then I had to change host providers and the site effectively went away with only the skeleton of yet another framework to take its place.
But mostly it just hurt too much inside not having him round to have some sort of comment on the site…the misspelling of a word he would catch or a particular picture he’d like.
But then something wonderful happened…I read the autobiography of “Babylon 5” creator J. Michael Straczynski called “Becoming Superman” and after reading about his truly horrific upbringing and struggle just to survive his own parents and family and then ultimately thrive as one of the best writers in Hollywood today.
And then came a revelation that about knocked me out cold.
I wasn’t done writing and doing the Tell of the stories for the kids. Not by a long shot. And at the end of the day, it was high time I got on with telling the story and showing the pictures the way I want them to be. And to make a conscious effort to continue doing so even on the days when it may hurt a little or a lot when the writing is the hardest.
Three months ago, that journey back from the abyss started with a brand-new domain and a vision of how to carefully separate the kid’s content from my own.
That began the long process of converting all that content over the years to WordPress using Genesis as the theme framework and Imagely NextGEN as the gallery plug-in of choice. I’m sure Imagely has just loved me as I’ve pushed their plug-in well beyond it’s designed limits but it has done very well in spite of the torture testing! 🙂
2,302 posts with 2,438 photo galleries covering 56,420 pictures later…all of the original content through 2016 has finally been properly converted to their new homes. And the beauty of it is that the sites are now much smaller at 30GB between the two of them!
williams-ohana.com will serve as the repository of the content for the kids and family adventures whereas sunfox.com will finally be what I originally planned way back in 1998…a home for me to share my perspective on things I find interesting, tips in photography I’ve learnt through the years, and the photos and stories of when I’ve gone walkabout solo.
Now that the conversion’s done, I’ll start filling in the holes from 2017 onward until I’ve caught up to the present day.
Hopefully you enjoy the sites as I does the Tell! 🙂