For reasons sometimes beyond my control, but mostly not, I’ve moved this blog around a heck of a lot.  It used to be on Upsaid, which was a very good host, but had limits as far as size.  What could be more limitless than one’s own domain?

Then I purchased planethuff.com, which exists now only as a redirect to my husband’s crime blog.  I do hope anyone who was still looking for me over there has figured out where I am.

Around October, I started feeling squeezed out of planethuff.com, and I moved all my writing over to the domain I had purchased for education, huffenglish.com.

When I migrated Much Madness to Word Press, I couldn’t make the switch work unless I changed the file name for the blog, so I moved huffenglish.com/dana over to huffenglish.com/muchmadness.

Finally, my former host screwed me over, and here we are — my own domain with my name in it and everything.  And I really like it.  Except all this moving around has made me too hard, I think, for some people to keep up with.  I tried to cover that base — I put up redirects and tried to e-mail people I knew read me most.

I don’t have any books on successful blogging, and frankly, this blog has never been what most people would define as successful.  That’s because I didn’t make it fit a niche.  It isn’t a crime blog or a book blog or a sex blog or a technology blog or an anything blog.  It’s just my ramblings, and most people (with the exception of friends, I guess) aren’t interested in that.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not complaining.  If this blog ever reached the popularity of Steve’s, I would be scratching my head, wondering what was wrong with these people and why they don’t have a life.  I’ve been writing online in some form or another, in different places, since late June 2001.  Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been that long.  Other times it seems like it’s been so much longer, mainly because my life is so different now.  In some ways, this blog has stood the test of time, because after all the roadblocks I’ve encountered in the nearly five years I’ve been writing, I still kept at it.  Most blogs last about four months.  A fairly surprising, but somewhat lesser number of blogs only last a day.  So I guess you could say that nearly five years isn’t bad.

Sometimes I wonder if I should count the years I kept an online diary.  After all, the entries are no longer accessible.  I don’t plan on uploading most of it here.  Anyone who read my old diary probably knows why.  When I left that place, I was attempting to shut a door on a painful part of my life.  But I still kept writing.  And the time I spent there wasn’t for nothing.  I learned a lot about writing online while I was there.  I suppose that’s why I count the time I spent there, even if you can’t read it.

Sometimes I go back and look at certain selections.  It is interesting, for example, to re-read my first reaction to 9/11.  I forget things, too, and sometimes re-reading is a sort of “Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought about that in a while.”  It’s interesting to see how that journal evolved, too.  In many ways, this blog picked up where the old diary left off.  This blog actually hasn’t changed too much in the two years I’ve been keeping it.  I don’t know if that means I found a niche after all, or what.

Sometimes I feel I’ve spread myself too thin.  I have compartmentalized several interests of mine into different blogs.  I’m even considering another blog.  I can’t keep up, and I know it.  I do have a demanding full-time job and three children!

I really enjoy this, though.  Getting my thoughts out there.  Publishing.  Having some people respond.  It’s addictive.