Hello, my name is Shawn and I’m a blogaholic…

Except I’m not really. But I think some people are a bit confused about the way I run my online presence. So I hope I can explain why I do things the way I do here…

It actually all started with this blog – casa az – in May 2006, after leaving my first ever online community h2g2 (originally started by Douglas Adams). There was no real plan or purpose to this blog, it was just going to be bits of my life here and there. Then after I got sick with cancer it became something more important (at least to me) when I gave myself the challenge to post something here every day, no matter how silly or trivial, no matter how sick and awful I felt, just so I could feel I’d done something with my day. And since then I’ve maintained the one-post-a-day policy, which really makes this blog a scrapbook of random snippets that end up being just like anyone’s life. I make no claims that any of it is interesting so it’s a mystery to me that so many people are subscribed to this blog, and then almost nobody leaves comments. But whatever. I do this for me. If you like it too, hey that’s great, and welcome.

Then in 2007 everything changed for me when I posted a few photos of my tapas lunch and suddenly everyone wanted to know about tapas. This eventually became Sevilla Tapas, which went through a few versions before finding a permanent home on my first ever self-hosted site azahar-sevilla.com

I was very new to this whole self-hosting gig back then and so I decided that azahar-sevilla.com would be the MAIN website (about what I wasn’t sure yet) and I would run other blogs on that site, which ended up being Sevilla Tapas, Azahar in Sevilla, Viva Las Tapas and Azahar’s Photos. As I didn’t know any better I set all these up as separate WordPress installs, so in fact they were each their own websites, but still connected to the azahar-sevilla domain. I’ve since been told that these didn’t need to be separate installs, and that the way I’d set it all up was very messy, but I actually found out differently later on.

For the past couple of years I’ve been thinking about diversifying and especially about being able to offer a specialised trip planning service for Andalucía. This stayed on the back burner until recently when I felt ready to get it going. But of course it couldn’t be a part of azahar-sevilla.com… it couldn’t be “city specific”. And to be honest, I am starting with Andalucía because that is what I know, but this could end up being a whole Spain thing. And so I came up with azahar-spain.com, which can encompass a lot.

My first thought was to incorporate azahar-sevilla.com with my new azahar-spain.com site… except azahar-sevilla.com actually has a very good Google rating and I’d be stupid to throw that away and start over from scratch. And anyhow, it made sense to keep them separate. Plus, although I very happily live in Sevilla now, I may choose to live elsewhere in Spain in future… so this is why I decided to diversify and also start the new website azahar-spain.com.

For those of you who find it confusing, it really isn’t. It goes like this – just two domains with their blogs and with obvious ways to link back to the main pages.

azahar-sevilla.com | azahar-sevilla.com/sevillatapas | azahar-sevilla.com/photos

azahar-spain.com | azahar-spain.com/azahartapas | azahar-spain.com/kitchen

I was told by my friend and SEO guru that I could actually incorporate blogs into my original WordPress install (so I didn’t have to create a separate WP install for each blog) but it turns out – as far as I know – that these are more limited blog-page “category” options and you are only allowed one of this sort of thing for each WP install. This is actually set up on the new website, but there were some glitches moving the existing content over to the older azahar-sevilla site so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fix that.

So there you go! All clear now? 😉