Though this is indeed a bit morbid, I couldn’t think of a better place to start off something called The Boomer Blog. If it’s gonna’ start with a bang, it might as well be a big one. It shall begin with them, or at least our generation’s innate fear of them.
Hello. My name is Ric and I’m a Boomer. In fact, being born in 1950, I always had the feeling that year was peak boomer”. It was ground zero for a population explosion the likes of which the country had never seen. The people who returned from World War II, came home and reproduced like crazy. They went at it like bunnies.
Having gone untouched for countless years, rgetter.com (a.k.a. ric@large – I’m not even sure if I’m going to keep that name, what do you think?) is finally becoming active again. I was afraid my stories were going to be lost in the crowd on SubStack, so I figured this may be a better place for them.
I’m going crazy trying to self-teach myself WordPress after all these years, so the going is slow and frustrating. I am still working on the layout and adding work I’ve written that has been just sitting around. I have yet to wrap my head around moving some photo galleries to the site. For example, I’ve completely lost the page that lets me publish this staging website to my live site.
Help wanted
If you have any ideas for a good way to learn WordPress (books, classes, cheap gurus) please get in touch. The “Contact Ric” page is working, as far as I can tell. Meanwhile, bear with me. This ain’t easy. I’m trying to make it so it is.
Progress – June 10, 2025
It is slowly starting to make sense, at least some parts of it. I think that everything I have up is working. I’m still trying to decide on a method for posting photos, whether to use the free, built-in tool or to pay for something fancier without knowing exactly how it would help. Stay tuned for more updates. (Oops. Got to run. I can hear our cat puking upstairs.)
Makes Me Grateful for My Bed 1972 Daniel D. Teoli Jr By: Daniel D. Teoli Jr. via Wikimedia Commons
“Woke” is a beautifully designed term of derision. Aiming a verb misused as an adjective at a well-educated, generally grammatically correct population is uniquely irritating. Then again, it is very hard for those of us to whom it can be applied to categorically deny it. This is especially true for me, a woke Boomer. I can easily look back and see the arc of the transformations that have been happening over the past two decades, having lived through the before and after.
Decades ago, I built a website by stumbling around Adobe Dreamweaver. It wasn’t half bad and got a few viewers. After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant and became embarrassingly outdated. Five years ago, I gave WordPress a try in a subdomain (go.rgetter.com–the “go” part is the subdomain). After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant for five years.
Now, I quietly disposed of the old site and am embarking on fleshing out this new one. Here’s what I have planned, levels of self-motivation permitting:
This modest post
Migrating various content I created elsewhere that should be useful to the general public
Moving the once-popular Journey to Japan pages here
Creating a gallery where I can show off my pictures and videos
Links to some of my better MacDirectory Magazine articles
Nagging myself to create some new content here
This little ice-breaker complete, if I have successfully fixed the file permission problem and it posts correctly, I may have the confidence to continue. Someday maybe I’ll even get good at it
Getting started in blogging, particularly being new to running a content management system is incredibly intimidating.
Getting the blog set up was like the first time I put on ice skates. I had read everything I needed to and acquired all the necessities. Instead of skates, socks and a hockey stick, it was a sub-domain, a book or two and a bunch of how-to sites. Then I spent an evening trying to get it right, performing all the necessary tasks, except for remembering to write down the new passwords.
But the first time I put on ice skates, I was standing up on the carpet on my parents’ living room and it was pretty easy.
But this is like the filling of getting out on the actual ice for the first time. It is very slippery, it feels pretty strange, and if I fall on my butt, a lot of people will know.