Hello my wonderful Imaginary Internet Friends!

As foreshadowed in my December post, after 21 years (!) I’m finally closing up the blog! It will vanish at the end of this month.

I’d been dithering about decommissioning for a couple of years because I knew I wanted to keep an archive, but there was a fair amount of admin necessary before I could do this.

A fair chunk of my older images were hosted by my now kaput ISP, so I’ve spent the last few weeks manually updating the broken image links on over 1,200 posts. So much copy / pasting! My poor, poor right hand and wrist!

I then grabbed a fairly expensive wordpress plugin to extract all the posts to word documents. Originally I was planning to export to pdf, but word proved much superior and a bit more flexible. The process was a little less seamless than expected, but not insurmountable. In no surprise to anyone, I am extremely wordy and I had loads of images – so now have 8 VERY VERY large word documents of blog posts – hurrah!

And as a last step, I’ve spent the last two days checking the word docs and blog side-by-side. I’m pleased I did because there was some glitching with the export of a few of the images. This was extremely nostalgic (and exhausting!), but it definitely reinforced that it is time for me to let go.

At this stage I’m not thinking of continuing elsewhere, but if I do, I’ll likely join ganching and anyresemblance over at substack. I’m towards_penelope there.

Thanks to you all for being here, reading and commenting and for your friendship. This has been a delight and was huge part of my life!

I wish all the fabulous things for you!

♥ Much love ♥