In January 2010, I started my new gig as Chief Engineer at Bluewater Broadcasting. The new job required me to move to Montgomery, Alabama (about 2 hours from my son Chase). It’s been a very difficult 3 years, 5 months, and 19 days – not only for me, but Chase as well.

Now that I’m done at Bluewater, we’re moving back to southern Alabama. In-fact we’re moving into a house right next door to Chase.

Both Tara and I are looking forward to being part of his day-to-day life again. One question we keep getting asked is, “How does Tara feel about living next door to your ex-wife?”

The truth is: my ex-wife and I haven’t so much as looked at each other funny in over 5 years. In fact, before the divorce was final both the ex-wife and I agreed to never let our personal feelings get in the way of our first priority: Chase.

Besides, we both re-married…and she’s the one who found the house next door.

Both Tara (my wife) and Erin (the ex-wife) were raised in broken homes. They know first hand the incredible amount of bull-shit kids must endure when dealing with divorce .

So, “Yes”. Tara is “cool” with living next door to my ex-wife. She doesn’t look at the situation negatively. We’re all adults here, and besides our kids are watching.

Since August  27, 2007 I’ve been chained to my very “How To” centric blog.

For 5 years, 8 months, and 21 days 90% of my content has been about how to help others “do things” with code. The other 10% have been rants or raves about geeky-web-designer stuff.

That ends today. I have completely wiped the database and done a fresh install of WordPress.

You see, the purpose of this blog was to make money via referral links to products I love like MailChimp, Hostgator, Thesis, and Genesis.

In order to generate enough traffic to make a sale, I would write about “How to do XYZ with ABC code” in hopes that it would generate sales leads to my freelancing business.

With my new gig at WebDevStudios, I no longer need to concentrate on referrals or lead generation. Instead, I can use my domain name as I see fit. Because, God forbid I write about my wife, kid, or crazy dogs…on a “tech blog”!

I swear, I’d loose 20 FeedBurner subscribers every time I wrote about anything other than code. In fact, traffic to this blog usually goes like this:

1. USER TYPES INTO GOOGLE, “genesis code snippets”
2. USER CLICKS ON MY POST “Genesis Code Snippets”
3. USER FINDS OUT HOW TO REMOVE THE THING FROM THE THINGY
4. USER CLOSES MY SITE NEVER TO RETURN

Enough is enough. I don’t want to be held hostage by this blog. I don’t want to maintain several social media accounts.  I almost signed up for a Tumblr account damnit! Why? When I can live my life online, all here, using custom post formats.

Bottom line: I want to “own my own data”. That starts with taking back my domain name.

• Yes, I will continue to share and maintain code snippets – but those are going to move to GitHub.
• Yes, I will probably re-write the top 5 posts from the old site (they’re due for a refresh anyway). Those include: Genesis Code Snippets, Install LAMP on Ubuntu, The Perfect APC Configuration, and Edit Genesis Footer.
• Yes, you will see pictures of my family, dogs, camper, deer stand, and all the different beers I drink.
• “But Greg! What about all the money from referrals??!!?!” Listen Scrooge McDuck, $15-$25 a month wasn’t exactly “payin’ the bills” ya know?

Thanks for following.