JustFrances.com at fifteen

Wow! JustFrances.com hit the 15-year milestone today! I don’t know that I expected that when I first registered the domain, but here I am, marking 15 years of “Just Frances: The blog”.

If you’ve been here for any length of time, you’ll know that this site began as a way for me to release random thoughts into the ethers as I re-imagined my life as a widow. This site itself was a partner site to my purely “widow blog,” which has since been incorporated here. And even that was a side-project to the family blog that Paul and I maintained in my pre-widow life.

Of course, this site is now my only personal blog as everything in my life is just me, just Frances.

Over the last 15 years, a lot has changed at JustFrances.com. Which is understandable, as a lot has changed about Just Frances. The content began with extremely mundane posts and periods of posting every day about nothing, whilst my widow blog remained the “emotional” space. Soon, JustFrances became the place for mundane musings and the grief of widowhood. And, eventually, it became a space for everything: A living record of my life in some form or another.

That led to my merging of the widow blog (no longer maintained) into this space and a new introduction post to explain the skewed timelines and some level of redundancy.

My last major revamp of the site began days after the 10^th anniversary out of necessity rather than desire. The content management system I had been using was no longer available, so I had to manually rebuild the site on my original system, which I am still using today. But as it’s been five years, I think it’s time for a little refresh. Or a big refresh. I don’t know.

It feels weird to think about a refresh now that Mum is gone, since I would generally get her thoughts on changes to the site. Mum was, after all, my number one fan and visited the site every day to see if there were new posts. And I posted adventures just for her because I knew how much she enjoyed reading about my travels.

In the coming weeks and months, I will start working on new templates so that I can make updates. I’ll have to find peace with the idea of making changes that Mum might not have liked, but I also know that she would be pleased to just have the content and to know that I am enjoying the life I’ve made for myself.

Of course, I also have a couple of loyal readers who might want to share their ideas about JustFrances and the things they want to see here. So, maybe I’ll reach out to some of them. You never know…

 But for now: Happy 15^th anniversary to JustFrances.com. Here’s to another 15 years – or more!