Saying Goodbye

I have a sad announcement to make today. Okay, it's probably not sad for anyone but me. Now that I think about it, I don't know why I should even feel sad. Maybe sad isn't the right word. Perhaps I'm feeling a little nostalgic. After debating about it for awhile, I've decided to shutter my blog at Focused Journey.  I'm not giving up blogging, I'm just moving to a different location and changing the name.
If you care about why I made this decision, please keep on reading. If you just want the location of the new blog, go on and jump to the bottom of this post. If you're already reading this at my new blog (since I'm posting this at both locations) I guess just do whatever you want.

My reasons for the switch.

• Economics. Having my own website involved paying not only for the domain name, but also hosting fees. While in the long run it wasn't overly expensive, I still feel the need to eliminate that expense. I am still paying for a domain name, but that is next to nothing. 
• Features. In playing around with the WordPress blogging features, I discovered things that I could do on WordPress that I really didn't know how to do with my own site. This may seem like nothing, but I enjoy having my blog automatically update both Twitter and Facebook with new posts without me having to do a thing. With Focused Journey, I was able to get half that equation working with posts being pulled into Facebook as a note, but this way works much better. 
• Reality. Part of the reason I had a full fledged website was because in the back of my mind I thought I would build it up into site with multiple pages and other things. Considering that I can't even define what those other things supposedly were going to be, I've come to realize that all I really cared about was the blog on my site. Writing is becoming more of a hobby and a dedicated blogging website just made more sense. 
• Name. Retiring the name Focused Journey was the hardest decision. I always liked it and still do, but I began to feel that it had become a misnomer. I recently wrote about a ketchup packet that I found interesting and posted a short story that had no significance whatsoever. For me personally, I had trouble reconciling my occasional random thoughts with the name "Focused." I almost felt guilty for writing something for no other reason than to write when it didn't seem to tie into my journey of faith. My wife argued that everything we go through is part of the journey and she's right, but in the end I still decided to let it fade away.

So there you have it. Life rolls on and at most only 2% of my readers will care about this. Thankfully, 2% of the numbers I pull in winds up rounding to zero.

For those that have followed my blog at Focused Journey let me just say thank you. If you want to continue to stay up to date with me, just point your browser to MatthewWright.me.

(On a complete side note, I'm learning Markdown and wrote this post using it. I probably went overboard, but it was entertaining.)