This summer (2021) I had a long mental list of website updates and upgrades to do, and as of now have completed most of them.

The first steps involved reworking my Horn Articles Online site and building this personal website. Then I got to some serious editing of two bigger projects.

Big project number 1 was rebuilding my train website, which has been hosted by a free blogging service but it was time to really update it. Which was a huge process as while I could transfer over the text of my content, only a handful of photos made the move, and I had to rebuild every post. If you are curious to see the site, the main page is here.

That was a big project that took me most of two weeks. Then I went on to the next big project, which also took close to two weeks, looking over and editing the entire content of Horn Matters.

I worked it over from bottom to top, it was quite a journey. Some content was moved to this blog, mostly content that was of a more personal nature, with some exceptions of course. About 100 articles were also cut from the site, and quite a few came back from being in limbo as drafts for years (with problems to fix).

With it all basically done now I have 860+ articles on Horn Matters, and pretty much every link and video in the site works. At two different points in recent years I had over 1,000 articles in Horn Matters! But honestly, I don’t think I will ever have that number again. I will keep posting there and here for any foreseeable future, but I’m turning my attention to other platforms.

One I’d like to mention I’m using less of is Facebook. To be honest, the Facebook page for Horn Matters generates very little traffic for the articles I post on Horn Matters. When Bruce posts a meme on Facebook, that gets seen … but my articles, the reach is quite depressed. The business model is they want me to pay to promote these posts, which I won’t do. Years ago, we got tons of traffic from Facebook, but no more.

But the good news is we do get some additional reach through Instagram and Twitter. Follow on Instagram @ericsonhorn and on Twitter @hornnotes

An additional aside, my train site also has a Facebook page and it also does not generate much traffic. Same reason, they want me to pay to promote the posts. No pay, no reach.

A final platform I have not yet mentioned is YouTube. I’ve got some travel coming up this week and I’ll be pondering what type of content I want to put there, but I will be working on this. I have a good number of subscribers; my channel is here.