Blogging

I took down most of my archives; 2008, 2009 and this year are still up. I also removed certain posts. These are the stats for my blog as it is now:

  • 869 Posts
  • 24 Categories
  • 8,309 Comments

This is my blog as it was then:

  • 3,768 Posts
  • 35 Categories
  • 20,976 Comments

I may take more down. I may change my blog up.

I thought about waiting until my ten year blog anniversary (January 1, 2011 — and now that I see the date I think maybe I should have just so I could retire on 1/1/11) but it’s going to take time for the internet to purge its cache and I wanted to dismantle it sooner. If I’m going to be (maybe) seeing clients in about a year, I need to unbuckle myself some. I don’t want to disappear entirely but I’m going to be rethinking my blog.

It’s been time anyway. I feel like what I started my blog to be it no longer can be and hasn’t been for awhile. I never thought that these public journals would become mainstream let alone targets for marketers and PR reps. I never though there would be huge blog conferences or ad networks or competitive awards. Originally I thought of a blog — my blog — as a kind of virtual performance art where I would try creating in public and see what would happen. I’ve always seen a blog as a living thing that is impacted by its environment as much as it is by its creator and that the creator herself would be changed in the act of blogging. And this is no less true since the commodification of blogging. (It’s like my argument that Disney fairy tales are as true a cultural representation as the original folk talks from which they’ve sprung and that they speak to our culture’s sanitzation of harsh realities in search of profits and so cultural literacy curriculum ought to include both Grimm and Walt.) That is to say that even though I am sometimes overwhelmed by all that Blogging with a capital B has become, it’s been a terrific ride on a personal artistic level and on a professional one as well.

But I feel like I’ve gotten all I can get out of it. I feel like I’ve wrung this medium dry. The number one thing I get out of my blog now is a relationship with all of you but I can get that on Facebook and Twitter. (And I don’t know about the rest of you but when Facebook took off? My stats dropped by about half. People don’t read my blog anymore; they read my wall.) So in many ways, my blog has jumped the shark.

Add that to my need to be more careful about what I share publicly and well, it’s time to move on in some way.

I’m not ready to give up my blog entirely because 1) I love the domain name; 2) I love WordPress.  I mean, I love my virtual space and I’m interested in exploring other ways to use it. But as a personal journal? I am sadly less enamored with it.

I’ve put my blog on a local WordPress installation on my Mac and I’ve tentatively gone to updating that version here and there to get a feel for journaling in (gulp) private again. It’s ok. I don’t think I’ll go to it that much (it’ll take time getting used to it) but I do like still having access to my 3700+ entries somewhere else. I love going through them — there is a lot that I forgot I wrote.

Now I’m thinking that maybe 1/01/11 might be my chance to do something new so that gives me about four months to figure it out. I’m still interested in that virtual performance art possibility so maybe I’ll be able to come up with something nifty. Until then, I’ll practice blogging less personally and I’ll keep taking down my archives. (My google page rank is sure to plummet. The only reason I’m so entrenched in the search engines was all of those archives I just removed. This is going to kill me that way!)

Get ready to read some amazing blogs! The editors of Parenting magazine and BlogHer have worked together to track down the year’s best family-oriented writing on the web. Now it’s time to celebrate the authors: We’ve asked these bloggers to create exclusive pieces for Parenting magazine and the BlogHer ’10 Conference, which begins Aug. 6 in New York City.

Wonder how we decided on the must-read parenting blogs of the year? We turned to the experts, a panel of 20 editors and bloggers from BlogHer.com and Parenting to go out and find the year’s best posts. These women took us very seriously, returning with more than 200 diverse, well-written nominees. Then we read and read and read some more, using this criteria to recommend ten blogs that we thought your year would not be complete without reading — theirs were the most interesting, well-written, and just plain fascinating pieces.

via Must-Read Moms 2010, from the Editors of BlogHer and Parenting Magazine | BlogHer.

My thanks to the editors on the panel (I see Shannon‘s hand in this!) for choosing my blog. I got word right around the time I was thinking of giving up and I thought, well, I guess this means I should keep on blogging!

You know what’s especially nice about this? A year ago I would have felt the need to try to exploit this to get some work but I’m going to grad school in just TWO WEEKS and so I’m just sitting back and enjoying it. Let the good times roll!

$100 Question Promo Graphic I’m the BlogHer $100 question today! From the good folks at BlogHer:

–The program is called “The $100 Question”
–This is a week-daily program (so, each Monday through Friday) where a different blogger will be asking a question, and one lucky commenter will be entered to win $100 from BlogHer.
–Comments must be made at BlogHer.com to be eligible for the prize.
–Commenters must be registered BlogHer.com users (all you need is an email address to register.)
–Your question’s contest will be open Tuesday, June 8 through Thursday, June 10.

And here’s my question (don’t answer here, answer over there so you can enter to win cold hard cash):

When I was about eleven I had a terrible crush on Almanzo Wilder. I would inhale the last three books of the Little House series on lazy Sundays, rushing through most of the story just to get to the courting. I loved it when Laura tried to let him down easy, telling him outright she was only using him for a ride home from the dreaded Brewsters where she was boarding while she taught school. I loved it more when he showed up the next week anyway. When I tired of Laura’s pioneer romance there was always Gilbert and Anne in the Anne of Green Gables books; Jo’s incomprehensible (to me) rejection of Laurie in Little Women and Calvin O’Keefe’s regard for Meg Murry in the Wrinkle in Time series, which surely gave hope to geeky girls everywhere. Who was your first literary love? Which scenes in which books sent your heart fluttering?

This based on a question I’ve asked on my blog and the answers were so interesting that I wanted to ask it again! So head on over, join up on BlogHer and please share.

THEN go over and read Julia’s amazing post today over at our special needs support site <– search engine bait and have a tissue handy.

Do you ever read someone’s blog and think, no! Stop! You’re too vulnerable! Don’t hang this out there! We talk a lot about how much we should share about our kids but there’s the sharing of ourselves, too. For the past month, I often cringed when I was reading Katie’s blog but I’ve cringed reading her blog before, too. She’s very widely read and she blogs about EVERYTHING. She blogged her divorce, she blogged her pregnancy losses. She blogs at her site and on Babble and she gets terrible, awful, mean comments but she keeps blogging.

Most of us writers already knew what many bloggers discover, which is that writing is one of the best ways to figure out what in the heck is going on with our lives. You can write your way out of a problem and into a new attitude. You can start writing in one place and put your pen down with a sigh (or lean back away from your keyboard) and realize that you have written yourself into a whole better place.

Katie is also a huge blogging as activism person. She has always been a strong advocate for breastfeeding and she has always blogged the hell out of it even when working full-time meant she had to partially wean her youngest. She blogs from a feminist, pro-woman, pro-motherhood perspective and some of her best work has been around the topic. I have no doubt that she will take her passion and her skill and create more wonderful writing out of her personal tragedy because she is driven not just to write her way through her struggles but also to use her work as a means to help other people through their struggles.

Blogging is powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s public but because it’s public and because blogging is rarely a carefully planned event for most of us (most of us kinda just wing it, right? I know I do) it means that people get snapshots of us as works in progress. To me, that’s what’s so wonderful about a blog and what makes it a piece of performance art (as long as it isn’t taken over by product reviews and memes — a little bit of that goes a long way, eh?). It’s a virtual permanent record of our impermanency, a record of our growth and change and the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.

When I teach blogging classes, I always give examples of blogs that are pretty rigid in their scope because I think for a new, nervous blogger having a focus can make it easier to get started. I also think that the irony of giving yourself strict limits it that it can force you to be more creative. If you are blogging, say, only about bikes you have owned, you will have to dig in deep to make that interesting. You may start by just writing about finding your first trike under your Christmas tree and then find yourself another time writing about the specific sound of the bell on the handlebars and the fantasy you had of yourself in other people’s eyes, powerful and fast on your first two-wheeler, ringing the bell so people would stop and stare in astonishment to see you fly by so fast.

At the same time, I think for those of us who stick ourselves or who are stuck by others in genres need to remember that blogs are not like books. A book may need to be easily categorized but a blog is a living thing. It is growing and maturing and while the readers help build the blog and help guide the blogger through their visits and comments (a popular topic may inspire us to write more on that topic), we are the authors and we get to define what we are. It’s why I’m grateful now that I gave my blog such a broad title way back when. If I’d defined my blog more narrowly — as “just” an adoption blog or “just” a writer’s blog — I’d have a hard time justifying my need to write other things; I’d be worried about disappointing my audience. But I’ve found that some of you like the posts on writing and some like the posts on adoption and some of you never ever comment unless I write something about, say, freelancing. It’s all good. And for me, it’s all been good therapy, too.

In other words, you can write more about bikes if you want to. You’re the boss of your blog.

So when I think about giving up my blog in January, I lean more toward remembering that I get to decide what it is and how to work it. I can change my scope. I can also take down archives. (I know they live on in internet cache but only a really dedicated spirit could find them and then god love her, let her read ‘em!) I think maybe I will give myself useful rules like that I will only write on Wednesdays perhaps or that I will only write on X or something like. I won’t be sure until I get there, I guess. But I do look forward to a time when I can afford to take down the ads because I’ve never much liked having those.

Part of thinking about not blogging (and thinking about continuing blogging) is thinking about the voice that most definitely wouldn’t be in my life without my blog. How will I feel when I don’t have a platform? How will I feel when I want to write something out loud for feedback and there’s no place to do that? How will I feel about watching my blog disappear, my hard-earned stats cease to matter? How will I feel when someone brings up blogging and I say, nostalgically, “I used to have a blog, you know. Not a bad one either.”

I’m still not sure.

But I do know that the blogosphere has changed a lot since I started and in some ways those changes have made blogging less fun for me. (I won’t get into the specifics of those things ‘cuz it’s curmudgeonly and things change — it’s the nature of living — so we best learn how to deal with it.)

Well, it’s going to be an ongoing discussion I have with myself for the next while. That’s all there is to say about it. I imagine that what I’ll end up doing is changing my blog in some way once I figure out what I’m not liking about it and what’s still working for me.

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