ReCraiglist: Update From the Past Three Years

Hi everyone! Sorry I haven’t written in a long time, over three years to be exact. Many of you remember me from my ReCraigslist.com newsletter. I’m going to be sharing my writing and posts primarily here at my new website RyanFinlay.com. It’s actually being hosted on a new software platform that my son and I built from scratch. More on that later! A lot has happened in the past three years and I look forward to sharing more about the journey in the weeks and months ahead. Here is a quick rundown of some of the big events, and you can expect some posts about these more in-depth in the months to come. - Moved from Hawaii back to Oregon at the end of 2017 to help care for my Dad who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. It was a sweet and hard past three years caring for him and seeing him slowly decline. - May 2018 volcanic eruption started in our community on the Big Island of Hawaii. This was a significant eruption that ended up burying 1k homes and wreaking havoc for months. During that, I covered the eruption for 12-16 hrs a day for months in an online community I had built up called Hawaii Tracker. That group exploded and now has 57k people in it. - Facebook made a video about the Hawaii Tracker Facebook Group. - Got invited to Facebook HQ for their community summit. - Started building our own software platform to host online communities and help enable them to be sustainable for people to be in control of what they build. - Started Roseburg Tracker, another local news and information community. It now has almost 15k people in it. - Said goodbye to my Dad 😢 - We continue to homeschool our 6 children. My oldest son is already an advanced software developer, the second oldest son is focusing on video production, the third has a passion for animals & birds and wildlife rescue, and our oldest daughter has also taken up programming and is benefiting from her older brother being a great teacher! Will have lots of posts on how we’ve been raising and preparing our kids for the future. - I continue to work from home, and we educate our kids at home, both of which have been great as we continue to navigate this pandemic. A lot has changed with the internet, remote work, and the future of work. I look forward to writing lots more about that. - Bitcoin is finally gaining broader adoption as an alternative store of value, and I’m very bullish on it. The internet finally has a native currency. - Higher education bubble finally seems to be bursting, and it seems like the final pinprick that started it was a virus that is keeping most college students at home. I believe higher education will never be the same as it was pre-Covid. And lots more. These past three years have been very full and very challenging. There were times I didn’t write because I simply was exhausted every day with work, family, and life. Especially during the eruption months. The rest of my time was often split between the care of my father, raising 6 kids, work, and starting new ventures. Things have finally settled down a bit and I would like to get back into consistently writing and sharing life updates again. This has been probably the craziest year for most of us and I sincerely hope you are all doing well. After you read this, feel free to sign up for a free account on the site so you can leave comments and interact more with future content. I would love to hear how you all are doing! - Ryan The new site can be found here: https://www.ryanfinlay.com/