hello from alabama

I used to have a 39 gallon reef tank several years ago, but I got frustrated and got out of the hobby. I am going to start a new tank in the next year or so, but after watching so many vids on youtube and trying to get into the current literature I see so many mistakes I made, and problems I did not interpret and deal with correctly at the time. For a beginner I actually got many things right, but my biggest mistake of all was not spending enough time talking to and learning from experienced reef keepers, so this time I am going to do it differently. I will post some pics of my tank, but I know what a few of my biggest problems were-the local fish store closed,so no ro/di water, and red algae went bonkers. our local water is terrible and toxic. I did not have a skimmer, and I was not smart about the mix in my tank- I had a huge sebae anemone, which killed all my crabs, etc, and it was in the worst place, bottom, dead center. I also used too much live rock when I started, and while I had lots of great shrooms and etc, they were frigging loaded with triffid anemones. With more mfg rock and less live I might have controlled that. I was also dumb in how I added fish- example, I had a blue damsel that pretty much ruled the tank and killed several peaceful fish I tried to introduce by continuously ramming them. When I finally got a coral beauty it put an end to his crap, fast, but by then he had killed 7 or 8 fish, and I was adding them by what came in the store that week, not by any reason. That sebae was way too huge, and I was feeding it scraps of grouper and catfish from the seafood dept at the grocery store, making it worse, throwing guppies in there, etc. It killed my nudibranch, my red deep water anemone, which kept moving around, all my crabs, etc. It also stung my brain coral to death I think. Anyway, I know lots of what I did wrong, but I am still open to criticism, but this time I want to avoid those mistakes.