The Story Behind Honor Their Stories

This article is going to be a little different than my normal ones. Normally, my articles are fact-based, short, and my writing style is pretty flat and emotionless. I do my best to leave my opinions out of my writing when I write my articles, and when I do share my opinion (something I should maybe do more often) on a certain issue, I put it in another section of the article so it doesn't get mixed in with the facts. I hope you don't find my articles boring, though.

Today, I wanted to share with you the full story of Honor Their Stories (HTS). This is probably one of the handful of articles I will write about myself (yes, I've written about things I've learned about the world from personal experiences, but I don't think I've written many articles that really focus on ME as a person). A brief timeline of it is up on my website, but it doesn't give you a good glimpse as to how I came up with the idea, or all the fun (in both the good and bad sense) I had remaking and reiterating the website. I'm really sharing this story, in hopes I might inspire someone else to become an advocate for an issue they care about. 

While the first official iteration of the HTS website was published in January 2024, I had the initial idea a little earlier than that, around late December 2023. I remember I was awake one night, unable to fall asleep, when a thought suddenly hit me to make something that would help veterans in my area. I finally did go to sleep a little later, and dismissed the idea for the time being. 

The thought hit me again in early January. It didn't sound too bad, but I didn't have any plan as to what that "thing for veterans" would be. After thinking about it for a while, I settled on creating a website. Problem was, I had no experience in website design or digital marketing, and I didn't even know how to make a website. I remembered my school had used Google Sites to make webpages for school events during the COVID-19 pandemic, so I decided to follow suit. I went to my laptop, and created the website. It was called "Share Their Stories." Now that I look back on it, it didn't look that great, but it wasn't a bad start, either.

I would soon run into a problem: once I was done, I clicked "publish," but I couldn't find it anywhere on Google. After hundreds of Google searches and scrolling through countless Reddit pages, I found out I needed to go to Google Search Console to get the website indexed, so I went there and requested an index. 

1 day passes. No luck.

2 days pass. Nothing.

A week passes. Still nothing. Now I'm getting concerned.

I started to wonder if this was really a bad idea after all. I was disappointed, but to me, giving up wasn't an option. I didn't want to give up on this idea yet. I went back onto Google and went to Wix. I had heard of Wix in the past as being a good website builder, so I decided to try using it. This also meant I was going to have to start over, from scratch, but I was willing to do it if that meant HTS would have a shot at being a success. 

After a lot of work, the first official iteration of HTS was released in mid-January 2024. It was also at this point that I renamed the website to "Honor Their Stories," since "Share Their Stories" sounded too generic. When I published it, I immediately went back to the Google Search Console to index it, and it did. I was ecstatic. Wix saved HTS from being scrapped. 

Fast forward to February 2024. I had written to my congressman telling him about HTS, and got an amazing reply: "Thank you for sharing your wonderful project with me that honors our nation's service members and military families. I am so impressed by your precocious activism and your initiative to help veterans and service members tell their stories of service and sacrifice." (I pasted that straight from his email replying to me!) I expanded HTS's mission to reporting on military news, and I was starting to enjoy that. 

Today, the HTS website is up on Google (with a few recent updates). I hope my movement will continue to grow, and that it will reach more dedicated people as time goes on. 

Young people, if you're reading this, I want you to know that you are never too young to become a force for good.