Evolution

How I got here

1. 2005 – 2011

   A Blogger blog

   From “Bananas” to my last post on September 21, 2011, I wrote 682 posts. The blog later lived at blog.travishellstrom.com.

2. Late 2000s – early 2010s

   Google Sites and project sites

   A simple personal site on Google Sites, around 2008 to 2010, plus project sites like Advance Humanity and Everyday Humanitarian. Those sites are gone now. Some pieces I could only find again in the Wayback Machine.

3. About 2013 – 2025

   travishellstrom.com on Squarespace

   Articles, classes, Advance Humanity pages, and my whole Blogger archive, which Squarespace imported under /blog/.

4. September 16, 2026

   This site

   Plain, handmade web pages. No platform and no page builder. Just files I can read, change, and keep.

Why owning it matters

For twenty years my words lived on other people’s platforms. Some of those places are gone now, and pieces of my writing went with them.

Now the whole site is a folder of plain files, and every change is saved in its history. When I send a change, my own small server picks it up and the site updates by itself. The same server handles newsletter sign-ups, the Saturday email, and the tools I write with. If a platform changes its prices or its rules, I’m not stuck. I can pick up my files and go.

I’m not doing it alone. I build it with an AI coding partner. I decide what we make and what it says, and the AI does a lot of the heavy lifting. My own AI, Sky, keeps the server it all runs on. By Day 19 the site had grown past 1,000 pages, most of them my old blog coming home. The tools have never been better.

How to move without losing anything

Squarespace’s export didn’t give me what I needed to move everything. So I stopped waiting for a perfect export button and used what my old sites already show the public. If you’re planning a move of your own, here’s what worked for me.

1. List every old address. Your site’s public sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml, is your checklist. Watch for doubles. Squarespace had imported my blog, so 680 of my 682 Blogger posts lived on both sites.
2. Pull the words out clean. On Squarespace, adding ?format=json to a collection address showed me the data behind the page. My Blogger blog’s public feed gave me the full text of every post, without the menus and clutter.
3. Rescue what’s gone. The Wayback Machine had saved pages from my old sites that no longer exist. Look there before you give up on anything.
4. Bring every image home. Download, resize, and host every photo yourself. If the old account closes, borrowed pictures can disappear with it.
5. Check every link. Old writing is full of links to places that are gone. Keep the good ones, fix what you can, and let the rest go.
6. Give every old address a new home. Write down where each one lives now. When the old site points to the new one, each address gets a permanent redirect (a 301), so an old bookmark lands on the real post, not the homepage. Better still, keep the old path: my archive serves each old post at its exact old address, so most old links need no redirect at all.
7. Move in waves. You don’t have to do it all at once. I started with my favorites, rebuilt by hand. Then I brought everything else over in one big archive.

Where I am today

On Day 8 the whole blog came home. Every post from Blogger and Squarespace now lives in the Blog, at its old address. The next day the last old pages moved in too. Here’s some of what has come home:

• The Blog: twenty years of posts
• Now
• Dreams
• Themes
• The story of my son’s name
• Eagle Scout
• The Optimist Center
• Advance Humanity
• My projects
• Peace Corps
• How I Stopped Biting My Nails
• My 10-Day Silent Retreat
• Everyday Humanitarians, my online conference
• Crafting Your Purpose, now free
• Influences, a class I co-taught
• B Corps
• The Perfect Cream Soda
• Inspirations
• My master’s thesis
• Press
• Books I love
• Favorite TED talks
• Favorite movies
• Stephen King reading quest
• Great speeches
• Interviews
• Five quote libraries, 1,537 quotes
• How many people use AI
• Daily Gratitude
• Dad Jokes

What I’ve built since

Moving in was only half of it. Here’s what came next, day by day.

1. Day 9 · September 24

   Every old page has a home

   The last eleven pages from my old site moved in, so every old address now has somewhere to land. The same day brought my Stephen King reading quest, the story of Sky, my own AI, and a plan for moving day, when travishellstrom.com itself comes here.

2. Day 11 · September 26

   Essay No. 003, and a shelf of book summaries

   If It’s Not a Hell Yeah, It’s a No went out that Saturday. Around it came summaries of books I love, from The 7 Habits to Essentialism, a two-minute quiz to find your optimist type, and my old DeLorean joke, back on the page-not-found page.

3. Day 12 · September 27

   First Readers

   Anyone who wants each Saturday essay a few days early can now be a First Reader. And Sky’s chart of how many people use AI moved here from its own little site.

4. Day 13 · September 28

   Back to the Feature

   The biggest fun thing I’ve built here. My best friend Jon and I have been texting each other “what should I watch?” since high school, so we made our own movie picker and fed it 1,657 of our own ratings, from my old Jinni account to Jon’s very serious Letterboxd. Set the time circuits for how you want to feel, hit 88 miles per hour, and it picks something neither of us has seen. Our ratings save themselves, Movie Night lets us each lock in a mood from our own phones, and the Hill Valley Drive-In deals out one great film at a time.

   

5. Day 13 · September 28

   The most playful day yet

   The same day brought a library of great letters and a page for teachers who’d like an author visit. Daily Gratitude and Dad Jokes came home, and the faces on my Inspirations wall turned black and white, blooming into color when you point at them.

6. Day 14 · September 29

   Keepsakes

   Saved copies of the articles written about me, in case those sites ever go down, all on my Press page, plus a keepsake of the Virginia Blueprint summit, where I spoke in September. And the Apple vibe got its Think Different poster.

7. Day 15 · September 30

   A picture for every link, and a site made for phones

   Every page got its own preview picture, 849 of them, so a link sent by text or posted online shows the page itself. The site got easier to read on a phone, with the next essay one tap away. And 1000 Words, the little app I write in every morning, now has a version anyone can use: free, no account, and your words stay on your own device.

8. Day 16 · October 1

   Rules I Live By

   A new series: one story and one rule, now and then on a Saturday. Rule No. 1 came from the essay readers answered most: if it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a no. The tour at the top of this page went up the same day.

9. Day 17 · October 2

   Hear me read it

   The Saturday essays can be heard now, not just read. Handmake Your Life and The Bicycle of the Mind come with my own reading, as a short film and as audio. Essays can hold slideshows too, and the sidebar fades away once you start reading.

10. Day 18 · October 3

    Crisper videos

    Every video on the site, about ninety of them, now plays without YouTube’s clutter: no title bar, no logo, no “Watch on YouTube” button. Just the video and a quiet row of controls.

11. Day 19 · October 4

    Essay No. 004

    How I Use AI went out this Saturday morning, with my own reading of it.

Where I write: the Writing Desk

The part of this site you’ll never see is the one I use most. The Writing Desk is my own little writing app, built for this site and running on my own server. Every Saturday essay begins and ends there.

My day starts on a blank page. 1000 Words, the app I write my morning pages in, moved into the desk on Day 15, so the first thing I see is an empty page and a little dot that turns green at 1,000 words. While I type, everything else fades away.

Good lines from those mornings become seeds. Seeds grow into drafts. A finished draft gets a Saturday, and that morning it goes out by itself, to this site and to your inbox, through my own homemade email system. There’s no Publish button. I just pick the Saturday.

The desk opened on Day 4, when The Bicycle of the Mind became the first essay published from it, and it has grown a lot since. First Readers can read a draft early through a private link. Essays can carry pictures and slideshows. I can send myself a test of Saturday’s email before it goes out. And it works one thing at a time, on purpose: a draft opens quiet, just the title and the words.

The essays themselves I still write by hand, every word. The desk just keeps everything else out of the way.

The Big Move

I keep one checklist for the whole move, from the first page to the day I turn off Squarespace. Here’s where it stands.

1. Phase 0Done

   The build

   The new site stands on its own, and the first wave of writing is home.

   5 of 5 steps

2. Phase 1Wrapping up

   Coexistence

   Both sites stay up while the archive comes over and Google learns the new addresses. The old site’s one job now is to send readers here.

   20 of 25 steps

3. Phase 2We are here

   Moving day

   The day travishellstrom.com itself points here. About two hours, every step written down and rehearsed.

   10 of 13 steps

4. Phase 3Post-move

   Afterglow

   Let the dust settle, then turn out the lights at Squarespace.

   0 of 5 steps

Moving day happens when all three of these are true:

• Everything worth keeping has moved off Squarespace (true)
• New pages are showing up in Google searches (true)
• I’ve said go (Squarespace stays on as the fallback until everything checks out) (true)