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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

WHY I BLOG

Today I am starting a new online course with  Kim Klassen and Xanthe Berkeley titled Behind the Scenes. It is all about blogging and they will share tips and tutorials that hopefully will improve my blogging skills.
   The assignment for the first day is to write about “Why I blog”. So here goes.
    I can’t even remember how I came upon my first blog, Southern Hospitality in 2006.  I was surfing and discovered Rhoda and her wonderful decorating blog. That led me to read other blogs and opened up a whole new world to me of other women out there who are willing to share their lives online. It looked like such a good idea that I wanted to do it too.
   So I began Season-to-Season. I named my blog that because in our little town in western Pennsylvania the seasons change rapidly (sometimes in one day we can change 30 degrees). It may be cold with frost in the morning and sunny and hot by afternoon. I thought about life being like that too. How quickly one incident can change your mood from happy to sad or vice versa. I wanted to record my life. I just wanted to use the blog as a journal for me privately and to let a few select people read it.
   I was very intimidated at first. So it became a chronicle of what was going on with me and my family. I was just beginning digital photography too at the time so the two grew together. I just took a photo and wrote about it. No elaboration. Just the facts, ma’am. No editorializing. No opinions, just statements of the week’s happenings.
    After a few years I became less intimidated with people reading what I had to say. I discovered I had a voice. Putting it out there was scary even though the subject matter I wrote about was pretty timid. I just enjoyed the daily diary and taking the pictures. So I opened up the blog for anyone to read.
   It’s still mostly family and friends that take a look at it now and then, but I put a counter on it and found out that as of now I have had visitors from all over the world and the United States. I always wonder how a person from Belize came to wander onto my blog. Did they find it interesting? Did my pictures look good? The post on Summer Solstice got 20 page views. I have had people visit from UK, Germany, Canada, Russia, France, Indonesia, Brazil, Ecuador, and the Netherlands. I have had 12,505 total views from people in the United States.
    Over the years my blog got more personal as I shared things about me and my family. One of my passions is interior decorating and it’s been fun to show before and afters of the things I have created and the projects we have done.
    As I learned more about the looks of the blog itself from other bloggers I learned to change the backgrounds and add different headers to make my blog more updated. I still have a long way to go to improve the appearance of the blog, but I am satisfied with it now.
    When I started out I only blogged a few days a week and now I sometimes post twice a day. I love blogging. I have learned so much from other bloggers and am proud to be able to create my own blog each day. I had some parts of the blog made into a hardback book.
   Here is my very first post about my son’s wedding:

What a wonderful wedding! Ryan and Jennifer exchanged vows on October 21 in Tennessee. The day was sunny and the leaves were just beginning to turn. The Mountain Valley Chapel was the perfect setting for such an elegant wedding. I am so happy for both of them. They honeymooned in Cozamel, Mexico where they snorkled and Ryan went scuba diving.

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