Tag: blog

If I Ever Get Dementia, Show Me My YouTube Channel

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Today I Hit 800 Subscribers

(After Launching My Channel in 2006) Twenty freakin’ years!

Not 8000, Not 80,000,
Eight hundred. Yeah, you read that right! 800 and teetering…

Fun Fact: Only 10 % of YouTube Channels reach 1000 subscribers. I’m in good company with the other 90%.

My very first video 20 years ago was a grainy, low-resolution clip of my sister shadow dancing at Burning Man. (since removed) I edited it in Windows Movie Maker. Digital cameras were still evolving, and the videos were Blurry. Tiny. Imperfect.

But that didn’t stop me. I continued to film and upload.

Back then, nobody really knew what YouTube was supposed to be. It was the Wild West. People posted funny skits, awkward home movies, random moments of life. No strategy. No branding. No algorithms to decode. Just curiosity and creativity.

Then came the how-to videos. Those were gold!

I remodeled parts of my house using YouTube tutorials. Total strangers taught me things I might never have learned otherwise. That was the magic — people sharing what they knew.

When I started uploading my trick riding videos, I picked up a couple hundred subscribers fairly quickly. For a minute, it felt like momentum.

Then YouTube introduced ad revenue.

I made pennies….literal pennies.

And then they changed the rules — you needed 1,000 subscribers and thousands of watch hours to qualify for monetization. That’s when my growth slowed to a crawl.

I didn’t have a niche.
I didn’t have a strategy.
I just wanted to share my crazy life in an artful way.

I’m a musician.
A hiker.
A traveler.
A ranch owner.
An artist.
A complete jackie-of-all-trades.

Over time, my equipment improved. My editing improved. I spent hours polishing videos into little documentaries of my adventures.

And sometimes they were full-blown documentaries.

I once flew to Kansas to stay with a family living in the middle of wheat fields as far as the eye could see. I filmed their simple life as farmers and the one-room schoolhouses they were restoring. I submitted that film to festivals.

Some of my videos have over 100,000 views.
Others have 25.

My subscriber count? It creeps.

I gain a few.
I lose a few.
I gain a couple more.
It inches forward.

It’s always teetering!

One day I’ll hit 1,000 subscribers. Or maybe I won’t.

But here’s what I’ve realized: That number isn’t the point.

The point is that I’ve documented my life.

When I go back and watch videos from ten or fifteen years ago, I smile. I remember who I was. What I cared about. What my voice sounded like. The light in my eyes. The people who were still here.

YouTube became my time capsule.

If I ever get dementia, I hope someone sits me down and presses play.

“Look,” they’ll say.
“This was you.”

And I’ll get to meet myself all over again.

800 subscribers – still filming.

Go take a look and don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE! I want to get to 801!

How I Built a Website in the Covered Wagon Days (1997)

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In 1997, I built my own website while living on a ranch, connected to the internet by a single dial-up phone line. I had no programming experience, didn’t know code, and barely knew how to use my PC! Windows was still fairly new, and I was migrating from DOS.


Old-timers will remember the terror: a black screen with nothing but a blinking cursor, a row of function keys you definitely weren’t supposed to press—and a few you were somehow expected to remember exactly what they did.

Getting online meant listening to that familiar screech of weird tones that went on forever and hoping no one picked up the phone in another room. If they did—connection lost, and yelling commenced.

I bought a book on how to make a website and learned HTML the only way available to me: pure stubbornness. There were no platforms or templates. I opened a plain text editor and typed everything by hand. Every paragraph, color, and line break had to be told exactly what to do. When something didn’t work, it simply didn’t show up. I had to figure out why all on my own!

Design was a workaround. Tables stood in for layout. Images were carefully resized so they wouldn’t take forever to load. That meant they had to be of very low resolution. Nothing was elegant, but when it worked, it felt like a small miracle.

And my site had movement (What??)


Flashing words. Simple animations. Photos of my ranch. Clickable flashing buttons.

By today’s standards, it was primitive. But in 1997, on a ranch with dial-up, it felt impressive. My friends couldn’t believe I had a website at all—let alone one that did things.

Publishing meant uploading files through FTP (File Transfer Protocal) software—photos and my HTML text file—dragging them from my computer into a place I barely understood. There was no undo. Every update replaced the last version completely. If I got it wrong, the site disappeared.

On a good day, it took over an hour to upload my website to the World Wide Web.

When I typed in the URL—some long, convoluted address with my name at the end—and the site appeared, I felt victorious. If it didn’t, I retraced every step, fixed what I could, and waited another hour or more for my site to upload again.

That internet was slow and unforgiving, but it was honest.
If something existed, it was because I made it exist from scratch.

There was no publish or undo button—just patience-lots of it.

For today’s bloggers and creators:
Before feeds and filters, we crossed the internet in covered wagons—
uphill, both ways, buffering the whole time.