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Origins of this & related Websites & Other Techy Stuff by the Author

William Dudley Bass on Earth at the Brink arose from the merger of two earlier websites and in some ways a third. This all began in November 2006 as a homework project for a year-long psychospiritual counseling practicum I was in near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I was a middle-aged student back those days. At the time my fellow students and I used Blogger to create and post our essays and insights. Blogger is a personal-website public-publishing platform bought out by Google (itself owned by Alphabet) in 2003. Google hosts the blogs as well as blogspot.com.

Years later, however, I wish I could change the name as “Earth at the Brink” sounds so damn dire. Yet things are dire for humanity! Back in the beginning here marketing gurus were conflicted on whether or not to attach one’s personal name. Those advocating for fast marketing identities, declaring using one’s personal name has little to do with ego, won out back in those earlier times.

Regardless of changes in naming conventions, my first website was called, Cultivate and Harvest. Felt Inspired by my agricultural roots and how I often approach things in life. It’s still up. Anyone can find them online at http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com. My last post there was around the Autumn Equinox in September 2011. I no longer update or comment there. All writings and fotos published there were transferred here where they were revised, updated, and republished.

This is posted at the top of Cultivate and Harvest:

WELCOME TO MY PERSONAL BLOG. IT ORIGINATED AS A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT WHEN I WAS IN DR. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS’ PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL COUNSELING PRACTICUM IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. I CHOSE TO WRITE ABOUT THE DEATHS OF MY PARENTS. SINCE THEN MY BLOG HAS EVOLVED INTO AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SORTS, SPRINKLED WITH VARIOUS STORIES, POEMS, AND PICTURES. WARNING: THIS BLOG ADDRESSES MANY DIFFERENT ISSUES OF LIFE AND DEATH INCLUDING SEXUALITY AND THUS SOME ESSAYS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN.

Dr. Robert Augustus Masters taught and facilitated the 2006-2007 counseling practicum up north in White Rock/Surrey, B.C., so I thank him for helping initiate my online work. Many of us in the program didn’t want to build out a website, myself included. “Robert,” as we called Dr. Masters, encouraged us all to write and especially to write to release our inner demons and angels, whatever they may be, to grow more self-aware, and, perhaps most importantly, share our awakenings with each other and the world. Besides, setting up a website and self-publishing for all to see was our homework. Most of us in the practicum came to recognize its value. Most likely there never would have been any website created by me for all the world if it were not for Robert Masters. In addition to writing as a series of homework assignments, Robert urged us to go deep, to climb down into those deep wells and caverns of our psyche to explore whatever we found. Robert generated the space for us to find our own depth. We excavated our shadows, turned ourselves inside out and back outside in, and learned to love thru all the pain. Robert August Masters wasn’t the originator of any Genesis, but rather ignited my own personal Cambrian Explosion.

My second website grew out of the first and ran complementary to it. At the Brink with William Dudley Bass was formed in November 2008 to serve as a platform expressing my take on geopolitics, history, and current affairs. My last posting there was in late October of 2011. At the top of At the Brink is this:

WORLD NEWS AND ANALYSIS WITH COMMENTARY AND FORECASTS: A synthesis of current affairs with integration and analysis of political, social, military, environmental, and economic events. Historical patterns are studied and blended with future trends. Multiple perspectives are merged toward a singularity of view. Sources are acknowledged. Opinions voiced and stands taken right or wrong. Agendas are advocated for from personal experience, education, and service.

In a sidebar minipost I wrote this about myself for the website:

 I’m an award-winning author who grew up among the woods and fields of rural Virginia. Cascadia’s home now, and here I love to write. I love it even better when I’m published and make a difference in the lives of others.

This Blogger website is still up as well. One may find it over at http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com. Everything published there was also transferred here, revised, updated, and republished.

Went thru a period of drift. Did a few freelancing projects, mostly helping students edit papers with some short-term marketing projects. More and more people kept asking me the same question upon hearing my sales pitch, however, and that was, “What’s your website?” Those in the field were curious about my past work. A few wanted to see my portfolio. I realized my two Blogger websites were inadequate, and I wanted one website to direct everyone to for any reason. Unlike a number of solopreneurs, I did not seek to set up a stack of different websites for different purposes. I had numerous natural gifts and skill sets, wrote about and for a wide range of different topics, and needed a website to function as an online portfolio.

Somehow I came across Deborah Drake and her Writer’s Circle – Blogging Workshop combo. She was someone I knew and respected from the personal and professional growth, training, and development industry. We shared similar interests in a number of workshops and seminars, and eventually I grew deeply fond of her. We reconnected on Facebook. Deborah was respectful, progressive, and community-focused. She expressed an imaginative blend of solopreneurial business and marketing wonkiness integrated with her cultural creative drive to serve, inspire, and transform the world. She could sing, hug trees, single parent a child, market like crazy over cups of tea, and run a business. “Let’s mix art, business, and courage to make the world a better place for all life!” was my take on her. 

She had started a community-focused writers’ group out of a teahouse in Bellevue, Washington back in 2010. Bellevue is, by the way, across Lake Washington from its sister city of Seattle. “The Teashop” is, sadly, no longer in operation, but served for several years as a local, Eastside gathering place for all kinds of artists, healers, and entrepreneurs, of whom many considered themselves the creative alternative to the Big Corporations. Deborah Drake’s Writers’ Circle was focused to help people, authors as well as those who didn’t consider themselves “writers,” set up blogs. She coached and trained them to both express themselves and to market their own businesses. I finally joined in the Autumn of 2011, and blogged on her website thru the rest of the year and well into 2012, commenting as late as 2013. The blogging group finally petered out by then, too.

What a gift being there was! I learned so many things from Deborah such as, obviously, how to blog. There was far more to setting up more sophisticated websites and to blogging than I had ever considered. She introduced me to other solopreneurs, too. Took courses in what steps to take to set up a website. Dove down those messy rabbit holes into free, open-source platforms and appropriate hosting services. Wrestled together with the pros and cons of self-publishing in an age swamped with digital information technologies as we simultaneously struggled to emerge from the Great Recession. Our circle of bloggers, fellow writers all, inspired one another to go beyond what we ever thought possible. These artist-business people taught me much, allowed me to share with them, and continued to encourage me. Apparently I inspired a number of them as well, altho my writing was often less business-oriented. I felt like an old-fashioned writer-writer, an author, rather than a blogger dude. While I felt out of place per my style and approach to the craft of writing, I also felt welcomed and thus felt I had found a new place to call home.

Even so, Deborah Drake and my fellow writers in our Tuesday gatherings at the teahouse catalyzed an explosion of creativity from me. My writing flourished as it hadn’t for years. I built up a portfolio, and in doing so, realized I am more of an old-fashioned author more than I am a blogger who freelances as a writer/editor. I am grateful to Debora Drake for her contributions to me and effects upon me and my craft.

One can explore Tuesdays with Deborah: The collective inspired writings of not so reticent bloggers at Authentic Writing Provokes here at http://www.authenticwritingprovokes.com/inspiredwriting/.

Built and created this website during my time in “Tuesdays” with WordPress.org, a General Public License (GPL) open-source software platform, with a bit of initial help from a number of wonderful people. William Dudley Bass on Earth at the Brink replaced my two Blogger websites and continues to evolve. The open-source software platform used here is licensed as GPL General Public License or GNU GPL, originally created at GNU Project by Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation. This is a distinct from the related WordPress.com, owned by privately-held Automatic, co-founded by Matt Mullenweg. He came up with the term, “copyleft,” as his play on “copyright.” I really dig that as I like to say, “Left on!” instead of, “Right on!” and surreptitiously turn all the dollar bills in some of the POS tills where I work to the left instead of facing right as is customary.

“Any website you create using the self-hosted WordPress software is 100% owned by you. The content you upload to these sites is also 100% owned by you. … The WordPress trademark and the WordPress.org domain is owned by the WordPress foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, whose sole purpose is to ensure that WordPress is freely available, maintained, and developed.” This is quoted from: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/who-owns-wordpress-and-how-does-wordpress-make-money/.

For FAQs regarding GNU GPL, see this by the Free Software Foundation folks: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html.

Host Gator, however, hosts my website on its servers for a fee. Also known as HostGator and often spelled Hostgator, HG was founded in 2002 and sold in 2012 to EIG, the Endurance International Group. In addition to Host Gator, EIG also owns Bluehost, Hostmonster, and others. EIG is formerly Bizland, founded in 1997, and HQ’ed in Burlington, Massachusetts. HG, however, moved from Boca Raton, Florida, to Houston, Texas in 2007, and soon opened a branch in Dallas. It set up another major center in Austin in 2010-2011. My experiences with them have been fantastic. Their customer service, technical support, and billing support staff have been patient, knowledgable, and downright awesome. You may view HG’s website at https://www.hostgator.com.

I use Askismet to filter out spam, and they’ve been highly responsive. After a spate of malicious cybersecurity issues during past couple of years, I’ve installed SiteLock as well. In addition I upgraded recently to a more secure URL address with SSL Certification thru Comodo. The http was reconfigured and my website redirected to https. The “s” stands for “Secure,” and a little, locked lock symbol is displayed in the browser bar next to the URL. There are others, too, dancing in fired up soups of encrypted algorithms. All for the time being and a wee bit of yesterday’s tomorrow.

Of course, we all change. Companies and systems change. Technology changes. Relationships change, too. The energy of life ebbs and flows. Any significant changes will be noted here as I am able to do so, as well as any future administrator.

One change I would love to see would be the peaceful replacement of our global capitalist system with something more democratic and cooperative where individual liberties are balanced with social responsibilities. The term, “democratic socialism,” comes to mind, altho this is part of emotional, push-button language where our solutions as a species towards so many overlapping, 21st Century “wicked problems” seem stuck, unfortunately, in the language of 18th and 19th Century -isms. One set of communities working on these challenges is the Creative Commons Global Network. In our litigatious world, however, I do want my work protected from theft, plagiarism, the misuse and abuse of trademarks and copyrights, and the avaricious, corporate conquest and regimentation of information, domains, and titles. In the meantime, go here to learn more about Creative Commons: https://creativecommons.org. Thank  you.

Last and certainly not least are all the friends who encouraged me to write and to keep writing. Two helped me repair my iMac when I was down on my luck and struggling to both write and work on my website with the limitations of an old smartfone. If those two men had not stepped up, my writing would have stalled and my website would have stagnated into a quagmire of incompletions. Thank you, Kurt, and thank you, Paul. You know who you are.

Sometimes, too, when all is quiet, I sense the presence of my mother who passed on in November of 2006. Perhaps it’s my imagination or a merger of recollections or maybe even a ghost. It was she, my mother, however, who first recognized my natural gifts as a writer as a nearly-deaf child barely able to speak. Dorothy Ussery Bass, a published poet herself, encouraged me to write and to keep on writing no matter what even if she didn’t always like or understand my words. Thanks, Mom!

 

William Dudley Bass
Thursday 11 April 2019
Thursday 15 August 2019
Seattle, Washington
U.S.A.
Cascadia

NOTE: My earlier, ancillary, & gestational websites

At the Brink with William Dudley Bass: 
http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com
Sunday 2 November 2008 – Saturday 29 October 2011

Cultivate and Harvest: http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com
Monday 6 November 2006 – Thursday 22 September 2011

&

Deborah Drake’s Tuesdays with Deborah: The collective inspired writings of not so reticent bloggers: http://www.authenticwritingprovokes.com/inspiredwriting/

My section on Tuesdays with Deborah is found here at: http://www.authenticwritingprovokes.com/inspiredwriting/author/william-bass/.

Enjoy!

 

Copyright © 2006, 2008, 2011, 2019, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.