BackWoods Drifter, The Evolution

In the beginning, there was a blog… and then another… and another.

I was almost 30 days short of having a blog on Blogger for one year. Before that I had a blog on the Lycos network for nearly a year and a half. With this newest move, I look back at how this blog came into being.

My first blog, West Virginia Outdoors Blog, was secondary to a website with the same name except for the blog part. When I started the website I had never heard of a weblog. Back then I was big into SEO because you had to be in order to get traffic to a website that is not updated nearly as often as a blog. Researching SEO then, I came across info about how a blog could help with traffic to a website. Since I was trying everything I could think of short of hiring someone to promote my website, I decided to give a blog a try.

My website, at the time, was hosted on the Lycos-Tripod server. With an account there, you could also host a blog. Talking about bare bones - no widgets, no clutter - just commentary.

For about a year I just went along blogging. First time ever really writing anything more substantial than a letter home. By the one year mark, I was more involved with the blog and the blogging community than I was with the website. Basically what happened is my blog was getting all the traffic and the website benefited very little from it.

In the 6 months leading up to leaving Lycos, I more or less abandon the website. It was there but I had stopped updating it. The reason for that is everything on the website, I could put on my blog. All the traffic was going to the blog so the website quickly lost its value.

As I got more comfortable with a blog my needs for more control of the blog platform started to be an issue. About the same time I was thinking of finding another blog, I started having a lot of trouble with Lycos’s ancient software. There would be times when I would go three or four days and not even be able to view the blog. Updating it was an absolute nightmare every time.

I started searching for a new blog host and found Blogger. Faced with the same predicament as this time - not wanting to lose posts - I was reluctant to leave Lycos. Just to see if I would like it, I signed up for an account with Blogger and left my pinto running in the driveway. In other words - ancient Lycos was history.

I started the blog on Blogger retaining the title of West Virginia Outdoors Blog. Mainly because the website was still on-line and the blog was meant to be an extension of the website. Somewhere along the line I changed from being a webmaster to being a blogger. I let the West Virginia Outdoors website pretty much just dry up and eventually took it off-line canceling my account with Lycos.

I was very happy with the new freedom I had with my new blog and the seemingly endless things I could do with it - whereas the previous blog I was lucky if I could edit it. Although I let the wvoutdoors.org domain expire with the Lycos account I still didn’t want my presence on the web to rely solely on a free hosting service. With that the Bolt Mountain, West Virginia website was born one month after the new West Virginia Outdoors Blog.

I named the new site boltmountain.com because Bolt Mountain and surrounding area is what I know and it is where I do most of my hiking. I set the site up with a wordpress blog and it has been erratic ever since. I post to it but not as often as I would like simply because most of my travels and adventures have been happening away from Bolt Mountain. But at least with the Bolt Mountain site I felt somehow more comfortable blogging on a free host.

With the creation of the Bolt Mountain site - a title for the new blog was needed. Simply because it made less sense with the WVOutdoors site no longer online. I was trying to come up with a unique name to take the place of the ‘West Virginia Outdoors Blog’ title.

I stopped at a gas station one morning on my way to work and this truck comes pulling in. This monster sat three feet off the ground and probably required a step ladder to gain entry. The only thing this truck needed was squirrel tails hanging from the antennae. Across the top of the windshield in big bold letters - you guessed it, The BackWoods Drifter.

I thought it was a perfect fit - times two, for the truck and my new blog. I love everything about the mountains and I very much enjoy the backwoods only in a slightly different manner than the mud king. But it was perfect and I adapted it to the new blog right away.

This past year on Blogger has been a pretty smooth ride up until the trouble recently. Even before the recent issues I was thinking about taking The Backwoods Drifter to the next level. Which, obviously, is this domain. I started thinking about it because I was thinking how cool would it be if my grandkids could read a blog I wrote. Personally, I’d love to read a blog my grandfather wrote if one were available. Moving the blog to this new domain is a step in the right direction in allowing my grandkids to read my blog. I have control.

So now here we are at The New BackWoods Drifter. I’ve done a lot of moving to get here but I can pretty much guarantee this - The BackWoods Drifter is here to stay.