I started the blog and a couple others in early 2017.  My thought was that I would write posts about IT and Vanlife and keep them separate.  That was way too ambitious for me.  At the time I wasn’t very interested in the IT world and the Vanlife posts seemed to take too much effort.

I ended up settling on using Instagram to post Vanlife pictures.  It had a simple interface and made it easy to crosspost to Facebook.  The icing on the cake was using an Instagram plugin for my Wordpress site that automatically pulled Instagram content and integrated it.  It worked pretty well.  For a while.

One day the Instagram integration stopped working because they made their API more restrictive.  Pretty irritating, but I got it back up and working.  Then Twitter began shutting developer API’s and it got me thinking more seriously.  Then Facebook shut down the ability to do cross posting through its API.  Twitter did it to try to make more money and Facebook needed to do it to stop the Russian troll bot farms.  Regardless it got me thinking.

It is just a matter of time before Instagram shuts down the API I am using to integrate it with my site completely.  They don’t make any money off of it and it doesn’t drive much traffic to their site.  When that happens, all my content is locked up there.

So to clean everything up, I merged all the content from my different blogs and Instagram into this one blog.  My strategy from here on out is to only post content to my own server and then crosspost links back here from Facebook, Twitter, and/or Linkedin so that people can find what I have been posting.

I also am using a pretty nice piece of blog posting software, MarsEdit 4.  Now with the right tools and the right strategy, you’ll start hearing more out of me.