This is a post I’m writing on February 24th, 2026.
I’ve been away from this website for a long time. It’s purpose is to gain experience using WordPress, and from that perspective, I’d say it’s been a success.
A year and a half into retirement, I’m working to dial in a balance of activities. Lately, I’ve been spending too much time on nextdoor, YouTube and Quora. On nextdoor I try to be a voice of reason, with my positions on issues backed up by links to verifiable sources. On YouTube, I’m a passive consumer. I’ve answered questions on Quora a few times.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been focused on an idea my wife had to generate an offline instance of the humane society’s listing of dogs available for adoption. Running with this, I’ve studied two vendor’s APIs and looked at ways to scrape their website. I have used a tool called httrack to make an offline copy of this website to understand how it works. Because it appears the tool causes heavy web server activity, I’ve refrained from trying to mirror the humane society’s website.