Crossing the River
Sometimes the hardest part of building something new isn’t the destination. You’ll find that it’s learning how to cross the water between where you are and where you want to be.
I thought I was simply moving my blog to a new platform. However, I found myself paddling through unfamiliar waters where every bend in the river concealed another decision. It offered another problem to solve and another lesson I never expected to learn. Looking back, my crossing over the river changed far more than my website.
The Choices
Standing on the riverbank, the opposite shore looked deceptively close. I could already imagine my new blog sitting there ready for future posts. What I couldn’t see were the currents flowing between the two banks. Rivers seldom reveal where the deep channels run or where submerged rocks lie waiting beneath the surface.
When I started this blog a year ago, I wanted to change its domain name from .io to .com. I wrote about that experience in Courage Redefined. “I wrestled through help files from two ISPs and their technical language such as DNS, @, CNAME, records, redirects, pointing to IP, TTL, 4H, A, and errors I couldn’t fathom. … It [the reward] was worth every irritation and annoyance.”
Preparing a new home introduced me once again to technical language that might as well have been another language. Domains, hosting, DNS records, propagation, and server settings were no longer optional knowledge. They had become the river itself.
This time, however, the challenge was different. The individual obstacles were not really dramatic. The difficulty came from their accumulation. Dozens of small decisions demanded that I learn something completely outside my normal expertise. Every choice carried its own implications, workload, waiting time, resistance, and testing.
The first choice involved the change itself. Should I remain on a managed platform with expensive features I hardly used, or move to conventional hosting where I would gain flexibility but lose the comfort of having someone else manage the technical side? I chose to move. This decision was like pushing a small rubber dinghy into an unfamiliar river.
When I changed the domain name a year ago, I eventually succeeded after calling in AI for help. That experience made my second choice easier. This time I would invite AI into the journey from the beginning.
Our conversations quickly settled into a familiar rhythm.
Me: “What is this thing? What does it do? Why does it exist? What must I do?”
AI: “It does this. It’s necessary because of that. Follow these steps.”
Me: (Uploading yet another screenshot.) “It still doesn’t work...”
And thus, we continued–one weary, brain-numbing step after another.
AI didn’t become a ferryman carrying me across the river.It is far more useful as an experienced guide standing on the bank, pointing towards the safest channel while reminding me that I still had to use the oars. The decisions remained mine. The mistakes remained mine (ouch). The learning remained mine. So, armed with little more than determination, I pushed away from the bank.
Into the Current
The new hosting platform offered me two ways to build the website. I could either hand everything to an AI agent, describe the kind of blog I wanted, and then let it construct the site automatically, or I could build it myself using the site’s page-building application.
The first option would be like crossing in a comfortable motorboat with an experienced captain. I would reach the opposite bank quickly, but I would arrive only with wind-blown hair and spray on my face, and not much knowledge about the river itself. That wasn’t why I had chosen this journey. I wanted a rubber dinghy with its oars. I wanted to understand how things worked and control them. That choice proved both rewarding and exhausting. The first rapids appeared even before I began building pages.
Website addresses had to point to the correct destination. SSL certificates had to encrypt traffic. HTTPS had to function correctly. Domain propagation had to complete. Every click appeared capable of producing a new current, pulling me sideways.
At one point an “Under Construction” page refused to disappear despite every indication that I had configured everything correctly. I drifted through conflicting screens and contradictory evidence before eventually discovering that the culprit was a single Developer Mode checkbox hiding my work from the world. It was like navigating a whirlpool. No matter how hard I paddled, I kept circling back to the same place. The whirlpool eventually released me, and I could I begin building. And I hit the rapids.
The Rapids
Creating pages sounded quite straightforward until templates, widgets and settings all began interacting with one another in unexpected ways. Was the problem caused by the template? The widget? The page? Or by me? The answer changed as the day progressed. In the morning, it was perhaps the widget; late afternoon, it was probably my frizzled brain. I could eventually abandon the safety of graphical menus and began editing HTML directly. Ironically, writing a few lines of code gave me more control than clicking endlessly through confounding menus. Progress was real, but it didn’t feel like it. Most days ended knowing that I had spent hours moving forward only a few metres.
Then came the migration itself. Posts had to be transferred. Images uploaded. Layouts rebuilt. Formatting checked. Headings corrected. Spacing adjusted. Typography refined. Links tested. None of these jobs were particularly difficult. But together they became the longest stretch of the journey. Many tasks sounded trivial until they had to be repeated for every article. Each successful page made the next one slightly easier, but the repetition became its own form of resistance. Then, just when I thought I could see the opposite bank, another side current appeared.
Privacy policies. Plain-language summaries. Contact forms. Email testing. Analytics. Google Search Console. Sitemaps. Search indexing. Each represented another paddle stroke, another slight correction to keep the dinghy pointed toward its destination. Exhausted, some evenings I wondered whether I had underestimated the crossing. Yet every obstacle expanded the map in my head–and that I liked! Terms that had once looked like meaningless technical jargon became familiar landmarks.
The Far Bank
Finally, the website worked. Visitors could reach it securely. The navigation behaved. The contact form sent messages. The analytics quietly did their thing. The pages displayed exactly as I intended.
Apart from a tremendous sigh of relief, there was no dramatic celebration. The opposite bank simply arrived. Moving the blog was never really about merely transferring words from one platform to another. It became about my willingness to step into unfamiliar water and refusing to turn back every time the current pushed against me. I set out hoping to build a website. Instead, I learned enough about hosting, security, page construction, HTML, troubleshooting and testing to feel comfortable in territory that had intimidated me only days earlier.
Is this not how worthwhile journeys unfold? We choose a destination or goal because it attracts us, but somewhere between the two riverbanks the journey changes us. We leave the shore thinking only about where we want to go. We arrive on the other side with different skills we never expected to acquire.
But every page reminds me of my rubber dinghy and the river I had to cross to get there. My reward in all this is that next time I find myself standing on the bank of another unfamiliar river, I will remember that the water may be colder than expected, the current stronger than planned and the crossing longer than imagined. I stepped onto the far bank with more confidence and experience than I had when I stepped into the bobbing dinghy.
Step off the river bank. Take the dinghy. Keep rowing, Keep steering. Will you be exhausted and irritated? Of course you will. But next time (and there will be a next time), it may be easier.
