After the Harvest, What Next?

It is September already. In fact, as I start this page, it's the 21st day of September, the beginning of autumn. Where the summer went, I haven't had time to think about, let alone muse over the good times had. And there were some good trips and a lot of beautiful weather and thankfully no serious misfortune.
   Last week my wife and I made what has become our annual September trek to eastern Washington. It was great in all respects and, as you can see from the pictures on this page, especially rewarding photographically. (whew! that's a long word!) We had some nice birding and the scenery from Steptoe Butte was even better than hoped for. But now it is, once again, autumn. I wrote some musings last year about autumn and they reflect well my feelings this season of the year. Now, however I've been musing over what to do with what I'm doing.
   Over the last few years, I've taken a lot of photos and written a few musings. For lack of anything better to do, I put the photos on a subscription website for others to view and posted to a local birding list when there was something new. It's been a good experience. Then, having a curiosity about how to do things I decided to learn some web programing and put together this site with my musings and pondering over whatever should come to mind, at first related to photography but later including about anything. Then, recently, I started another site where I could use jvhigbee.com as the address with the idea that such would be an advantage.

So now I have three websites to post to and maintain and none of them will do all I want to do. Pondering over the problem I can see that adding a third site that isn't much different than one of the others isn't going to help. Also it becomes clear that to continue with musings on this site is no longer serving my need. This site requires much to lengthy a process to go from writing to having it onsite to be read. It also is hard to find in a search site, like Google or Yahoo, and has an address line that even I can't remember.
   Summarizing the problems then:
     This site, Comcast, is hard to find and even harder to remember; it requires more than a necessary amount of work and time to post something once it is ready; and the amount of webspace available is quite limited.
     Pbase, the site where most of my photos and a few short musings can be found, has been a very positive experience. Such has been the case for millions of other users which has brought about one of the problems with it. It has slowed to the point that many will lose patience waiting for a page to load and move on. Another thing I have come to chafe at is the inability to go much beyond the standard format. Not that I would expect to for the low price of the subscription, but still a real negative for me at this point.
     I thought the newest site, sponsored by Smugmug.com, allowing me my own domain name, might be the answer. But even allowing for some customization, it still doesn't give me the latitude in design I want. It is also more expensive than pbase by twice.

The obvious question then; isn't there some way to combine everything onto one site that was easy to find and could be formatted in such a way as to accommodate both photos and musings to my liking? What would it take to have my own website, josephvhigbee.com for instance, and program it so that I could add or remove material with a reasonable amount of effort and still present it in a way that was convenient for those wishing to view it? I certainly can't afford to pay someone to build such a website for me, and besides that just isn't my style, so for it to happen I have a lot to learn and do. Can I do it?
   And a further consideration is how much will it cost even if I do learn what's needed and how to do it myself. The webspace is more expensive, books and programs to help me learn and do what's needed are also costly. And the cost in time, initially, is more than I would likely spend if I continued with all three of the other sites. Lots to muse over. On the other hand, if I let such things start to slow me down at this point in life, I could lose momentum and everyone knows that isn't a good thing.
   I started this musing with the question, "After the harvest: what next?". Well, in farming the answer is more work, so there will be another harvest next year. I'm not a farmer but the principle is the same; if you want to continue reaping rewards, you have to do the work and sow the seed.