Hang with me, please, because I’m sort of thinking out loud.
I’ve been blogging since before it was called blogging. First it was on angelfire – where I had to learn just enough HTML coding to get anything to even show up on the screen, and I learned about intellectual property rights. Then I tried Typepad – I was in college and wanted to do graduate work, so I tried really hard to pull myself together and write thoughtful, though/provoking pieces about the news and what I considered code words that “normal” people didn’t understand. But it got to where what we now consider standard blog features were going to cost me $100 a year, so I migrated to WordPress. I got my “own dot com” (as Quinn calls it) and tried to photo blog my way to photojournalistic portrait fame. Along the way, I’ve had blogs through Xanga and Blogger and Tumblr – possibly dozens of variations and side projects and ideas that didn’t pan out.
I always come back to the same few basic ideas:
I like to write stories.
I like to share photos of details.
I like to try to explain what I’m learning.
I like for people to feel included. (There are exceptions.)
I like to build a record of what we’ve been doing – a sort of timeline/archive/life update sort of thing. (I think that’s why I like seeing my Instagram feed on Tumblr; it helps me break the posts down into monthly batches.)
I’m hoping that I can make my way back to blogging and keep those basic likes in mind.