Decommissioning Homesteading Edu

[macmex]

Many of you know that Jerreth, our daughter Emily, and some good friends and myself worked on the development of Homesteading Edu for about 7 years. We've learned a ton. Many things I learned while working on that website can be seen (albeit subtly) in some of my posts here. We've learned much and developed a lot of very good material, but one thing we never managed was to break even on the expenses. For every dollar we earned I bet we spent a hundred.

Additionally, for well over a year now, I have been experiencing increasing difficulty handling the work load of my day job, the homestead, the garden, the websites and ministry. For the last several months Jerreth has been helping me to streamline and to offload some tasks. In this process we've come to the difficult decision to decommission Homesteading Edu in August of this year. At that point we would need to spend another thousand dollars, just to keep it from shutting down, and we aren't going to do that.

I don't know if we have the time and energy to save all of the material on the website, but I have begun doing so. I have all the graphics, already on my hard drive, but writing HTML documents, especially so that they are compliant with Google's requirements is a huge task and we'd like to save the HTML itself, in case we ever decide to launch anew, or to use them in another internet venture. None of us has the actual courses and blogs already stored on our devices.

Anyway, I needed to let you know. Some of you have memberships and may want to access those materials while you can.

[rdback]

Sad to hear George, but certainly understandable. I know you, Jerreth and others put tons of effort into it. It's a great knowledge base - hope you can save it in some way, shape or form.

[heavyhitterokra]

Sounds like it's time to gear down and take a load off. Peace my friend, peace. That's a very important part of life. Some people never find that, but I believe you will.

[macmex]

We vacillated over decommissioning Homesteading Edu, as I have seen some improvement with my memory. However, it's become clear we need to take the website down. We're working on saving everything so we might be able to republish in another venue, perhaps, someday.

By the new year we should have everything off the website. Presently we're taking the courses down. 

[hmoosek]

That’s really sad, George. I was over there the other night and there’s a ton of good information. I can tell much work went into developing the site.

[macmex]

Oh my, yes! For seven years it was like working a part time job, on the side. Most blogs took me 5-7 hours to write and the lessons much much more.

We have learned a whole lot through it. I'm permanently "stuck" in picture taking mode, for instance. I take photos of everything and file them away for future use. Our vision was to help many people with becoming more resilient and live better lives but we did need to at least break even, and, eventually the load took too much of a toll, especially on me.