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I am very sad to announce that I will be sunsetting this website on Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Some of this site will live on at other sites. In the following paragraphs I will explain my reasons for shutting it down as well as some future stuff.
The main reason is money. It will cost between $200 and $700 to renew the site for between one and three years. And the domain name is an additional $30 to renew. Since I have had some large expenses lately with regard to vehicle maintenance and other things, I didn’t want to dump more money on my credit cards. Also, income from ads on the site has not been good at all. I have gotten some neat stuff from advertisers to evaluate these last seven years such as a backpack, clothing, shoulder strap water bottle & phone holders, a tent and more. But the ad income just wasn’t there.
Another factor is time. Unlike Ronco appliances, when it comes to a website, you can’t just “Set it and forget it”. A website needs to be maintained in the form of new content, updating ads, checking the advertising links to make sure that they still work and keeping up with new technolgy. It takes a lot of time.
A third factor is my health. I am having blood pressure issues, my hearing is shot, my short term memory is bad and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I’m going to try and get out there and hike more but it is getting tougher to do so. The stamina just isn’t what it used to be.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, I still think that there is money to be made with it. Most of the affiliate networks and advertisers were very nice to me. Some of the rules that some of these affiliate networks and advertisers had were, in my opinion, rediculous, but most gave me opportunities to make money and I appreciate it. I think my biggest issue as far as advertising revenue goes was just a lack of traffic to this site.
Back in the late 1990’s when I first got into affiliate marketing, it was simple. Just slap some ad banners on your web pages and the money will flow in. However, nowadays, one has to write stories that involve products, do product evaluations, take videos with products inbedded in them and more. It is a time consuming process. I’m sure that the best influencers on social media spend the majority of their time creating this stuff. I just don’t want to anymore.
So, when the site goes down on July 15, 2026, the domain name mikecalabrese.com will again become available. I hope that one of the many other Mike Calabrese’s out there can grab it. As far as the trip logs go, I am not saving them this time. If anyone wants a record of a certain hike, they can save any of the trip log web pages on this site as a .pdf. The blog posts will go away also. Same goes for the store and the features area.
Now, the trail distance calculators are usually the most popular pages on this site. I have given the code for these thirteen trail distance calculators to fellow hiker and computer scientist Randy Rowell of Raleigh, NC. I have known Randy now for about 25 years. We have never met in person. But since I gave him the code for the Appalachian Trail Distance Calculator that I wrote in 1999, we have kept in touch. Randy has agreed to take the code for all of the trail distance calculators on this site. You should be able to see them now or in the near future at:
So what’s in the future for me? I plan on trying to get outside more, establish and maintain more personal relationships and ween myself off of social media, which I consider to be either digital heroin or a digital clique. I’m not sure which is worse. I enjoyed the technical aspect of maintaining this site. I think that WordPress is a great platform to host a site on.
So I wish everyone that reads this post the best. Thanks to all that have friended me on Facebook and Instagram over the years. I haven’t decided whether to just cut back or cut them off. As for the young men in third world countries that posed as attractive young women trying to friend me in order to get at personal information, I forgive you but you will have to attone for your crimes by going to prison and becoming someone’s “illegitimate dog”.
So, in conclusion, love one another, try and do good and make the world a better place for all.
Mike Calabrese
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