My cousin Josh Ellis has been writing a twice-monthly column in the Burke County Tribune for nearly 20 years. He has been writing old school, publishing in an actual printed newspaper all those years. He’s written over 450 columns! Over the years I’ve been able to read some of his writing but not much because of the limited distribution. I’ve always wished I could read them all.

I had recently been chatting with Josh. He shared a couple of columns he had written about Ireland and thought I may like them after our recent trip — Lucky Man and Friends and Children. I thought they were great and told him that if he ever wanted to get a website running for his column on I would be happy to help.

About a week later he pinged me asking how to start and shortly after Rambling Josh was up and running! 1

He sent me 240 of his columns and I imported them into his site. Plenty to read, but only about half of all of them. We are going to keep working to add more. I also made sure to get his first column Shadow Puppets up. I hope to be able to help him get them all online. Some of them will have to be OCR off of clippings he has saved.

It was awesome to help Josh get this going. I can now get his new column in my feed reader. He also has a subscribe option so you can get it via email. Plus, his collection of columns will now be available for all. And even better, the open web gets a great site. I joke that when a blog is started an angel gets their wings. 🪽

He is a really good writer. There is wit and personality in all of it. Check out Rambling Josh and add to your reader. He may get an email subscription option going too.

PS: The “Surprise Me” button is a good way to read random columns. Just keep clicking.

Update: We’ve added another 80 columns, for a total of 320 now!

  1. Josh’s column has always been titled “Ramblings” ↩︎