Time To Say Goodbye
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A Mammoth Effort - Possibly For Nothing
Changes are happening quickly, over here, at the Burt-Cave, and sadly, the time seems to have come to wind down this little operation, since the number of people who benefit from it don't justify the cost of running it.
Over the past five years, since the idea of Burtman started to brew, I've worked extremely hard and for very long hours, creating the technical systems and writing content, and I've been sharing a lot of the things I've been getting up to and learning, because it made sense to me that people would be interested in the creative side of being an unemployed van-dwelling bum. But that wasn't really the case. In fact, I think my wide range of content has just made the whole place overwhelming and hard to navigate. And that's not just because someone told me that my wide range of content makes the place overwhelming and hard to navigate, either. Although that did happen.
But for that reason, I stuffed all that non-van type jive into a stinky trunk and shoved it under the bed, where only signed-in members could find it. The hope was that the simplified guest view might make the site less daunting and more welcoming for new members, but I forgot one thing, which was that I have no idea how to get people to actually see what I create. Despite years of presence and hundreds of articles, hundreds of hours of development and an intricate SEO system, the number of new members (and donations) has remained very low.
Loose Ends
There are still quite a few van guides that I had hoped to write (and some that I might, just because I still like doing it), as well as some generally useful guides for things like wiring electrical sockets, soldering properly, and the like... but many of those jobs just never got done because I haven't had the time, and a few of them really depend on good weather (spray painting and filling being among that category).
Anyway, that's one side of it. The other is that I have given this site almost five years of my life and I feel like it's time to move on to something new, since this particular horse seems to have been flogged to death. I will continue producing stories for my 
Stories From The Road series, until the end of series three, after which, I hope to eventually compile and sell the whole set as an ebook. Pretty much everything else, though, is more of less at the end of the road.
Locking Up And Killing The Lights
I have really struggled to reach people with this blog, and although I do have a small base of very meaningful followers, for whom I am especially grateful, the overall workload of producing content for this site is basically an unpaid job which I can no longer afford to turn up to. And thus, I will not.
So, there you have it. Five years of work has come to an end.
If you've shared any part of this journey with me, thank you. Really. I won't forget it.
If you'd like to keep up with my travels, photography, projects and writing, I'll be doing most of it over at Substack, from now on.
- Burtman
And What Of Open Road Media?
We have just said goodbye to Publik-Rekords.com and with that, the last standing Rails application is this one. Following the decommissioning of this website, the Rails server will be turned off and the PHP applications will be moved to a new hosting platform, where a new team will manage them.
Open Road Media will be focusing on media production from this point onward, with work on the current film ramping up in the spring.
You can follow the work of Open Road Media via my Substack and BMC pages.
Thanks to all who cared about this project. Your support made it worthwhile.
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