The Times They Are A-Changin'

This is tale about changes that are eventually coming to this website, though changes that (if done properly) will only affect me, and readers here might not even notice much at all.  That’s the hope, at least. 

But the reasons for the changes are core to the story. 

The point of the story is that I will be transferring the website from Weebly, which has hosted the site since it began over 13 years ago in January, 2013.  This, though, is about why the move.  And what moving entails under the hood, away from what people here likely won't see. 

When I started with Weebly, it was because it was a simple “drag-and-drop” platform, where no coding was involved.  It was also pretty inexpensive.  The former reason was most important.  I didn’t want the headaches of anything convoluted.  Though since I would be doing this for no charge, the latter was no small matter.  

The latter hasn’t changed.  The technical running of Weebly has.  (And to be clear, the latter will not be changing.)

To be clear, as well, the Weebly service was very good for a long while.  Not ideal, but those are the trade-offs with simplicity.  It worked fine, bordering on well.  And any of the things it didn’t do well were all under the hood – I saw them and had to deal with them, but to readers, they were invisible.

The biggest downside in the early years (and to this day) is that one can’t properly schedule a post.  If I would prepare an article in advance and set a schedule for it to show up, it would appear on the site at that scheduled time…but Weebly would post it for when it had been written.  (In other words, if I wrote a piece on March 10 to be posted on April 12, it would get posted on April 12…but would appear in the timeline back on March 10!  So, it would be buried a month earlier, and no one would see it.)  Needless-to-say, this limited scheduling articles in advance.  So, for the most part, I’d only schedule one or two articles in advance at a time -- and usually only schedule them a day or so ahead.  Anything more in advance, and I would only write the text, not format it or embed the videos.  I'd only do the formatting at the last minute.  Which is why calling scheduling "the biggest downside" is the polite term.

Related to this, Weebly would occasionally have a mind of its own, and articles would get posted out of order.  I would then have to reformat them (if they included graphics or videos) and re-post them – which meant the original link to them, which I would use to promote the articles with on social media, would no longer be valid. 

The Search engine has also always been wonky.  You can’t use quote marks around a phrase to search only for that term.  Instead, even with quotes, it brings up results for each word.  And search results show up randomly, not ordered by date. 

Then there’s the issue that if I want to edit an old article (for instance, if I spot a typo, want to update it, or a video link is broken), I can’t jump to it directly, but have to scroll through its month in the Archives list one…page…at…a…time.  (If the article to be changed was on the first day of the month, it was galling:  I'd have to start at the last day of that month and scroll backwards through every single day -- I couldn't just go to the last day of the following month and simply scroll back one day.  Not shockingly, I found this very tedious.) 

All manageable.  Though as these issues built up over time, they did become less charming.

And then, about five years ago or so (more or less), Weebly was bought by a big company called Square.  That’s when the greater barrage of problems began occurring.  “Greater barrage” because Square is mainly focused on the online corporate world.  Blogs are a secondary interest.  In fact, there even were reports that Square might drop blogs entirely.  They didn’t – but their support plummeted.  That’s why more problems began cropping up.  And why they would generally take a longer while to fix them – if they fixed them at all.  More on that in a bit…

 The biggest of these new problems was the use of HTML code.  HTML is basic to all websites on the Internet, it’s their language.  One didn’t need to know how to code with HTML in order to use Weebly, it was all built-in. But with HTML code, it made embedding tweets, Facebook posts, online graphics and non-YouTube videos brain-dead easy.  (YouTube videos were the easiest, Weebly let you just enter those directly with their "www.YouTube.com/xxx" address. But videos that were, for instance, attached to Twitter posts or on a company’s website – those use HTML code.)  But easy to embed:  just right-click, copy the HTML code that pops up, and then paste it into the “Embed Code” box on the Weebly site.  Done!  Easy.  The video is embedded.

That is, until Hell Night.

One day about five years ago, I popped in HTML code to embed a video, and the site here went kablooey.  It turned out that Weebly said I’d used too much HTML code on my site, and it was overloaded, causing the problem.  (I believe I asked, “How Is It Possible to Use Too Much HTML Code????!!!  The Internet is Based on HTML Code!!!!!!!!  That's like being in France and speaking too much French!!!”  And then added, “You Even Have an “Embed Code” box!!!!!)  And so, ever since then, for the past five years, if I wanted to embed an online video or graphic by simply pasting in the HTML code – I couldn’t.  And haven’t.  For every video I've posted since than, that wasn't from YouTube, I’ve had to try to track down the video from elsewhere, download the video and then convert it to an MP4 video file and then re-upload it, a process that could take 20 minutes or so…or just not use the video.

That’s been a big one.  But other issues kept cropping up.  And wouldn’t get fixed.  I won’t list them all.  But the line was crossed with another Search engine problem.

Late in 2025, I noticed a weird occurrence.  On the first of every month, all new articles posted would not show up when searched for.  I had to contact tech support and convince them to re-index the site.  That would solve the problem.  Until the next month.  But that wasn’t the problem – it’s that every month I’d have to convince them that this solved the problem.  Instead, we’d waste massive time as they asked me a range of the same questions to try to track down the issue.  I’d have to beg, “Please.  Just re-index the site.  That always solves it.  Every month.”  But even that wasn’t the problem. 

The problem, which crossed the line, was when they finally said – “We see what the problem is, but we won’t be fixing it.  Instead, though you can just install a third-party Search engine on your site.”  Putting aside, “We’re not going to fix it” – the thing they're not going to fix being a Search engine, which is pretty basic on most every website in the world – installing the cheapest third-party Search engine I could find would cost three times annually what I was paying for the entire site each year!

So, that – along with the awareness that there would likely be more problems, none of which would be fixed – was enough.  And I realized it was time to transfer this site to another platform.

That’s the background. 

Now, for the part about transferring this site and what’s entailed with that and how it won’t (hopefully) affect readers here at all, but you should know about it.  And I’ll try to keep it reasonably short.  Which I failed to do above.

 I decided on a service called Wix, which is a top competitor of the industry leader Wordpress, but seems to fit my needs better.  I also tracked down what I think is a good group, Wix Legends, that has top badges from Wix for building and transferring sites.

The big problem with porting my site to another platform, though, is that Weebly uses a propriety format (of course…), and so there’s no automatic way to just transfer the site.  That would have been too easy.  Instead, it all has to be done manually.  Especially since I want to new site to look just like the current site.  The Wix Legends folks are in the process of building that, though it’s a long process.

The other hurdle is what to transfer.  Transferring nothing, just using the same format would be fairly inexpensive.  But it would be empty.  Or I could transfer several hundred old posts or a transfer few months of them, which makes some sense since most people only read new material, or catch up on a few days of material – and so my “news” related articles become dated after a week or so.  And that would be reasonably priced.  But it would also mean losing 13 years of my work.  Not the end of the world.  But – it’s losing 13 years of my work. 

Moreover, I find that strangers on the Internet often search for a subject and find an old article here.  Or I like to repost something that hasn’t been seen for years.  Or I periodically scroll through old articles and find things I like but had forgotten, which occasionally gives me an idea of something new to write.

So, I opted for – "Oh, okay, go ahead, transfer it all."  The downside of that is the process is very expensive.  And the monthly plan for Wix is higher since it requires much more storage.  At a certain point, one does wonder, “As much as I want to save all the material -- is that worth it?”  But…well, I decided, yes, it is.  It’s 13 years of work.  And even if it rarely gets seen – some of it will.  And  (let’s say it all together now) it’s 13 years of work.

 So, at some point soon, I’ll be porting everything over to Wix.  And hopefully it will look almost the same, if not exactly the same.  (I'm sure there will be some differences.)  And hopefully I’ll figure out how to use Wix so that it’s second nature to me.  And, again, should be close to identical to you.  Not to worry, I’ll give a heads-up.  The site might have to be down for a day during the transfer – or it will be instantaneous.

In fact, I got a note from the Wix Legends team yesterday who said they're progressing well and are getting close to presenting the new site to me.  And they want to set up a Zoom call with me next week so that they can do a sort of "walkaround" to familiarize me with managing how Wix works.  

All of which brings up a final point.

All of this is very costly.  And the monthly plan fees will be much more than Weebly.  But I’m still not going to have a pay wall.  This will still be free.  That’s not changing.

What will change is that I’ll probably more often bring up a way where people can help defray the cost a bit – even though (and this is the good part) it won’t cost anyone a penny.  Really.

 I’m referring to that little box you likely have seen all the time that sits in the upper-right corner.  It’s yellow and say’s “Buy Now from Amazon.com.”

Occasionally, I get a monthly report from Amazon that shows how some people here have, actually, used that link.  Though not often.  (To be clear, it doesn't say who used the link, it just give an aggregate dollar total.  Or often, an aggregate cents total.) Hopefully, people will use the link more often moving forward.  It’s easy, and (really, honest) doesn’t cost anything.  Here's why --

 Amazon has a feature called “Amazon Associates,” of which I registered for years back.  If people are going to browse or buy something on Amazon, but click on that yellow badge first – it will take you to Amazon.com, and browsing Amazon will be exactly the same as if you went there directly instead.  Exactly the same.  The one difference, that has zero to do with browsing, is that if you buy something, Amazon knows you came to it through Elisberg Industries, and I get an incredibly teensy percentage.  It doesn’t cost  the user anything, it’s just a tiny fee that Amazon pays Associates out of its own Amazon marketing budget.

The fee I get from each purchase is deeply, deeply minimal.  But if it happens regularly, the fees to add up.  They’ll never come close to offsetting the cost of this transfer, but every little bit helps.  So, I hope that if anyone here is going to Amazon to browse or buy something, they’ll come to this site first and click on that “badge” that will take them to Amazon.

If you don’t, you don’t.  That’s fine.  But I hope that people do, and that it becomes second nature.  And I’ll bring this up from time to time.  I haven’t done so for quite a few years, so I should change that. 

Anyway, that’s the tale.  About why the change.  As well as what it hopefully will be.  And I’ll give a heads-up as the switchover nears.  And hopefully people will regularly or at least sometimes click on the Amazon Associates badge.  Whenever you want.  Even starting now…

 And that’s the news.  And if you have any questions, ask away.  Either as a comment below, or a direct, private email from the "Contact" tab in the headers at the top..

By the way, if anyone ever decides they want to buy a boat on Amazon, great – just please remember to click the Amazon badge here first.