Since August most of my free time has gone into this site rather than onto the page. This is an account of what I’ve done, why, and where it goes from here.
Why bother
This site has carried many things since 2012, and before that it lived on Blogger from 2003. Over those years it became a working site as much as a writing one. It took bookings, reported days with clients, shared forecasts, and carried other people’s words and whatever platform was in fashion. Much of it was useful at the time. Read now, a lot of it stands between a reader and the coast.
Thirty yards is the length of a fly fishing line. It is also the range I mean when I talk about this coast: a short stretch, known over a long time, where everything I need from the sea is possible. The site should work the same way. Close, plain, and about one place.
What I’ve done
- Taken out other people’s words. Working back a year at a time from 2025 to 2019, I removed the poems, lyrics, articles and product copy that stood in for my own attention. Where a photograph of mine carried the post, the photograph stays. The quotations that open my own writing stay.
- Left Instagram. In August I stopped posting. It was taking a few hours a week, and the work was lost in the noise. The posts that came across from it are gone from here too.
- Started TideLines. The need Instagram met, a quick frame from the shore on the day, hasn’t gone. TideLines is where that lives now: one photograph, a line or two, the date. No feed and no follower count. Notes don’t go out by email.
- Separated the writing. The Coastal Blog now holds the longer pieces and the writing from the book. The notes are on TideLines, the photographs on Seeing. The coast holds the twelve pieces I’d stand over.
- Made the way around simpler. Writing, Photographs, Workshops, About, and the book, in that order.
- Given the book a home. Rising Tide Setting Moon has its own page now. Pieces from it appear on the blog as they are written, marked From the book.
- Kept it quiet. No tracking beyond WordPress’s own visitor counts, and no pop-ups asking for your email. There is one small box on the home page if you want the writing sent to you. A privacy page says plainly what is kept.
- Started on the old posts. The posts from 2012 to 2015 came across from an older blogging tool and broke on phones, with photographs pinned to one side and the text squeezed into a column a word or two wide. I’ve begun fixing that.
What it’s for
The book is the point. Rising Tide Setting Moon begins with a boy on the river behind his home, and follows the water towards the sea, through Wexford Quay and the estuary, and out along the wider coast. I want it in readers’ hands, with an exhibition of the photographs alongside. Everything on this site should lead towards that, or at least not stand in its way.
I’m not after traffic. I want the site to be found by the people who would read it: people with a place of their own, who might recognise it in mine.
What comes next
- The years 2012 to 2018. About seven hundred posts, most of them from the guiding years: day reports, forecasts, weeks with clients. Some are worth keeping as a record. Many belong to a business that has run its course. I’ll go through them a year at a time, as I did with the later years.
- More writing, fewer changes. The building work is mostly done. What should show from here is new pieces on the Coastal Blog, and more of the book.
- The coast itself. Notes on TideLines whenever the shore gives something worth a frame.
If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you for staying through the building work. If you’re new, Start here is the place to begin.
Jim