Bright Spring Colors Are Here

Spring has arrived in full force now. Down here that means in about a week, summer should be here and be baking us alive. At this point already have the air conditioning running, but it's nice to say goodbye to the cold.

This is a busy season in our area. Baseball is in mid-season form (NCAA Division I on the road to Omaha, maybe). Late March and early April is the most colorful time of year in our part of the world. Last year we finished building and planting a very large Iris garden and we have been waiting all winter to see what survived. The first one to arrive is a Tall Bearded Iris hybrid called Bernice's Legacy. This one is an incredible dark burgundy.

All together last year we planted at least 65 unique hybrid Iris bulbs, along with all the generic colors like purple, yellow, white, and so on. For this post, since I'm still working through my most recent edits, I just have this one Iris, Bernice's Legacy, to share with you today. In real time we have at least 3-4 more unique colors that are already in bloom, ones with ruffles, multi-colored, fragrant, all uniquely different.

Blogging Updates Are Coming

The colder days in January and February this year were spent working almost non-stop on my new blog(s) and websites. I'm making progress, but it's a slow burn with the size of this project. As far as I can tell I have almost 1700 blog posts, 100's of pages, countless notes, clips, snaps, and almost 800,000 images spanning more than 25 years of creating online content.

That means decades of making mistakes, transferring those mistakes to other places, and living through countless platform updates and code changes from Wordpress.

This change had been brewing for years with me. I have been ready to take control of my own content, get it organized, have all the photos viewable and easy to load, fix all those broken links... all the things I have always wanted to do with my online content but never wanted to take the time to do it.

Well, now I am deep into the abyss of doing it. I'm currently building scripts to get every detail worked out of exporting xml files and importing to markdown using Obsidian, designing out a specific theme ux, and pulling in all the content I have ever created. It's a huge project, and one I am also doing simultaneously with our travel site Shanty Travelers as well as Deborah's blog too.

My Biggest Online Project

I don't think I have ever taken on a project as comprehensive as this one. From the first computer I ever used I kept all the data it created, every college paper, every email, I stored all my work on countless hard drives over the years going back to the late 90's. I've kept everything, and now I'm using pieces and parts of all this data to build out my most ambitious website project I've ever made. If you are asking "why!"?

Well, I keep asking myself that too, and there are nearly countless reasons I can come up with at this point, but the most important one being my passion for photography and blogging. At this point this has become a lifelong project for me, and I want to see what I can produce when I really put some effort into the work. When you go to websites today you are inundated with ads, or the websites look sloppily built, bugs everywhere, no organization, so I do think people can still appreciate an experience online that is well thought out, organized, free from ads and sales pitches, and this is what I have always wanted to build.

New Websites

I did not envision having to gain a skillset as a data scientist or systems administrator, and all the other technical aspects of website design, hosting, storage, and so on, but here I am. It's a skillset I'm glad I now have.

If you want to see the work in progress, I'm building it live instead of just working until it's "finished" and then publishing it, mainly because it's such a huge project, but eventually this blog will move over there to scottfillmer.xyz and this one will be repurposed. I've also been able to setup static sites now for my media at slf.media where it holds 100,000 images that feed my websites content, and my company website, Fillmer Services Co as well.

I'm as excited about this project as any one I've ever done online and exhausted at the same time. I'm no longer constrained by what a platform says I have to do, but with that freedom comes a lot of decisions and work.

While I work on that I'll leave you with more spring photos from our garden. I hope you get to see some spring colors where you are.

Our Current Spring Colors

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