This blog is the third incarnation of Real Live Preacher. My original blog was at blogs.salon.com from 2002 to 2005. Then a friend set up a Drupal site for me. I didn’t know I should have been paying someone to upgrade Drupal regularly, so after a couple of years, my site got into trouble. I was inundated with comment spam and other security problems that later versions of Drupal addressed. The server I was using did not give me enough resources to handle the traffic load from Real Live Preacher.
 
I didn’t know it, but Real Live Preacher was on the verge of collapsing. And I didn’t have adequate backup arranged, so I would have lost the entire site. I have all of my writing in the original Word documents, but I have written so much that I probably never would have found the time to manually re-enter it.
 
At that point, Tim Miller found me. Jethro Consultants took over the management of the server/software for Real Live Preacher. They moved me to a new server and got the database files into safe storage before the old site fell apart. Which it did a day or so after they got my data backed up. RLP was rebuilt in the latest version of Drupal. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to import the content from the old site into the new site. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, but it couldn’t be done in a standard Drupal export/import. My original Drupal version was too old for that.

Jethro had already done so much for me - the rebuild and rescue operation ended up being WAY more than they bargained for. It wasn’t right for me to ask them to develop a custom script to get the data imported. So the 2008 version of Real Live Preacher was missing my writing from 2002-2007.

I had other financial priorities, but I’ve finally saved some money and paid for Jethro to write a custom import script. So all of my old stuff is now here at the new site. There are continuing issues. The comments aren’t here yet, though they are still preserved at the last site and the original salon site. There are some formatting issues and missing images. But we're getting there. (Honestly, the script should have cost at least 4 times what they charged me. They spent hours on it, running tests and trial runs)

It feels like my children have found their way home. I think of my writing as children. So much work goes into each one, then they go out into the world and have their own lives.

With all of my blog writing in one place, I was able to see how much I have written over the years. I have written right at 1000 blog entries at Real Live Preacher. I pay close attention to word count with things I write. I estimate that the posts average 1000 words each.

That’s a million words.

It’s also averaging a blog post every 2.25 days for 6 years. That with some of my posts taking me as long as 8 to 10 hours to write. I generally work on a number of things at once so that each one has several days to mature. I’m a very slow, meticulous writer. I don’t like to be hurried. I have given entire days to one essay. Many times. Just pecking at it and playing with it and luxuriously spending a long time choosing the piece of art to go with it. Writing cannot be hurried. You can’t cram a day’s writing into 4 hours by working harder. It doesn’t work that way. You have to submit to a creative process. There are no shortcuts, at least none that I’ve found.

I make no claims about the quality of my work. That's for others to decide. But I can honestly claim to be a hard-working writer. I am dedicated to the art of writing, and I have embraced the discipline of it as well.

There is some more work to be done with the import. I have to visit each blog entry and do some taxonomy work, tagging them with subjects and tagging some as essays, others as personal updates, etc. There is a quite a bit ahead. But my babies are home, and I’m very happy about that.

rlp