It’s been 9 years since I updated Michigan Martins. In fact, for several months now the site has been down due to lack of technical updates and no one even noticed, or at least no one contacted me about it.

Why haven’t I done anything with the site all these years? Several reasons.

The first was the growth of social media. I joined Facebook about the time I dropped off updating this site. There were big advantages to using social media to share things, especially that friends and family didn’t have to come to this page to see new content, it would just appear in their facebook feed every day.

The other reason was convenience, or lack thereof. Updating the page, especially the photo albums, was quite a chore. Nothing was all that user-friendly a decade ago. I had envisioned everyone in my family sharing photos here, but that never happened. I can’t blame them. Adding photos to the site required a good bit of technology and time investment. I wrote up tutorial emails and all, but no one invested the time.

Fast forward to 2020, and I’m looking at what’s out there now to make this site work again. Can I make it easy for everyone to add content? Maybe I can even link it to their social media, so things they share there could be added here? I don’t know, but that’s what I’d like to look into.

All of the pictures I posted back then were no longer accessible. Not lost, but not accessible. The photo gallery link was a dead link because the software package I used to organize and display them was long ago abandoned and became incompatible with the current server environment. I’m currently testing new gallery packages and will be importing the pictures back into the one I choose. As of today, there are a few test galleries running.

A lot of the old posts look bad because something they linked to is gone, especially anything involving video. Most of the stuff we did with video in those days was in Flash, and now Flash is being purged from the web. I’ll need to go back and re-encode things and make that work again.

I’ve been re-thinking the social media thing these days. While convenient, it is not a great platform for family, and certainly not good for what I’ve envisioned doing here. Companies like Facebook take ownership of what you post, and determine who is going to see it. No one really wants to post entire galleries on social media, it’s more amenable to a few pictures here and there. Ultimately, I ditched Facebook a few weeks ago because it’s a disgusting company, but that’s another story. I’m still doing some social media with MeWe, but I’m interested in getting back to work on Michigan Martins to make it a legacy family site.

We’re all storing our digital photos and videos somewhere, maybe we can make them accessible to family (and the future of our family) here? At a minimum, it could provide us all with a backup of our valued photos. I’ll be looking at ways to integrate sources like Amazon Photos, where I presently back up everything we do with our phone cameras.

Stay tuned!