My South Lane enters retirement

Seven years ago, while camping with a friend along west Odell Lake, I came up with the idea of starting a blog. With some fine-tuning that idea became My South Lane, a blog about life and the outdoors in south Lane County. My personal goal was to get out more and explore. I thought having a blog would motivate us to do that. It did!

Canoeing Carter Lake mid-July

Over the years I’ve shared a lot of adventures, history, and ideas on this blog. I’ve also met some very nice people and had some wonderful opportunities because of it. In all, looking at my stats, I’ve done 212 blog posts (this will be 213!). I’ve learned tons about the history of the Cottage Grove area, I’ve explored hiking paths, visited wineries, and brushed up on my local flora and fauna. It’s been great fun, and I’ve enjoyed sharing it all.

Today, while we still hike and canoe, still learn about birds and flowers, and still drink wine, my interest in spending the hours to do the research, writing, photo editing, and general blog/social media management have waned. There are still places I want to explore, and I have partially written blog posts waiting to be shared, but honestly my motivation to be online and on the computer is no longer there.

Osprey nest at Row River Nature Park

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but coming to My South Lane has been an ad-free experience. You should have never experienced a Google ad on this site. I never linked to Amazon to get kick-backs from products, and I’ve never done pop-ups to get you to subscribe to a newsletter so I can sell ad-space. I understand why people do that, but that is not the experience I wanted to share with this site. However, being ad-free means I have footed the bill myself. And as I approach the 8th year of this blog, the annual bill is due and it isn’t cheap.

Despite the fact that I haven’t given this blog energy in many months, it still gets a good number of viewers, and frankly, I still use it as a resource myself, so I don’t want to pull the plug entirely. However, I do need to bring down the cost. So, over the next week or so, I will be attempting to move this blog over to wordpress.com, with the goal of maintaining the MySouthLane.com URL.  This means that the next time you come to My South Lane you’ll probably see several obnoxious Google ads; the page-specific URLs will most likely change; and I am not sure what will happen with the subscriber list (for those of you who get emailed notices of new blog posts).

Maybe down the line, sometime, I’ll get the urge to blog again, and I can dust-off My South Lane, and bring it out of retirement.

For now, a humongous thank you to everyone who has joined me on this journey. Thanks for your comments, thanks for your encouragement, and thanks for your support and ideas. I’ve enjoyed this, I hope you did too.