The Axe Badger is dead. Long live The Axe Badger.

Well. Listen. Look and listen. The Axe Badger is dead.

I don’t want to go too much into the detail of it, but The Axe Badger was…struggling. I couldn’t afford the price of hosting, nor of the website itself. Point in fact, the cost of the ding dang thing was increasing every year, and the last payment cost something close to $500 bucks, which is, you know, not sustainable for a blog that doesn’t make money.

So I shut it down.

And you may be asking yourself, dear gentle reader, how it is that you’re reading this post right now.

Well, it comes down to a few people. Namely Joy (Joypocalypse) and Paul (Mysterious Paul).

Smart people, big help, and a lot of digital handwork.

A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning the cost of the site, and my sincere wish to move off of the host and go back to my first love, WordPress. Alas, said me, I know what I should do, but I have no idea how to do it.

Mostly because I, you know, got my MFA in creative writing and not something useful like a programming degree or a masters in information technology or whatever.

But Joy, being someone who is able to think both laterally and about other people existing the world, suggested I talk to Paul, who, if you are unaware, does this kinda stuff for a living.

So I talked to him, and he very graciously held my little, badgery hand all the way through the process, letting me use one of his sites (in maintenance mode) to rebuild, by hand, The Axe Badger.

Yes. Yes I moved 256 posts by hand. Thousands of pictures. Copy paste and copy and paste. I had dreams of moving blog posts.

It took something like 42 hours or so. Maybe more. I blacked out for some of it.

But here we are. The site is moved. It’s clean. Optimized. Not held under the yoke of some two bit jerkoffs who wouldn’t even let me do goofy stuff behind the scenes with widgets.

I feel like I need to say it again: Thanks to Joypocalypse for short-cutting my doom brain, and big, big thanks to Mysterious Paul for cutting through the nonsense and making the whole transfer operation so very, very successful. Ya’ll are gems.

I’m still coming down from the excitement of it all, but I wanted to share with you where I’m at, as a person.

What I’m asking from you:

This new site gives me the opportunity to do a whole lot of new stuff – for much less cash, thank goodness. But it does come with challenges. Here’s what I’d appreciate, truthfully, if you have a moment to spare:

1. Look around the site and lemme know if anything seems, you know, bad.
2. Be patient as I fiddle faddle with the site. I want to add some more stuff. If things radically change between weeks, just know that I’m a weird little guy who needs to experiment.
3. I kinda need to rebuild how social works — at least on insta, so that might get goofy. Sorry. I guess this isn’t a “thing you can do for me” and more a statement.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to share. Thanks for coming along with me on the journey so far, and thanks for reading!