Blogging Journey

Invitation

This post is motivated by a prompt, as part of a blogging club that started last week. As soon as I found out about the club, I signed up (today). If you’re interested in blogging more this year, you can still join the Blogging Club, which will provide you with a weekly prompt to get you blogging regularly throughout 2017!

My Life as As a Blogger

I started my first blog while I was working in India, sometime between 2003 and 2005. I lost years of posts when I transferred the blog in 2008. I had a back up and intended to upload the posts again, and had a page of pictures for a while, but never put in the time to re-upload the old posts. For that first blog, I would tag posts either professional or personal. In 2010, I decided to host a separate professional blog. This blog was born as a result.

Over the years, I’ve continued to blog off and on, but never consistently. In some of my positions in schools, I’ve had to maintain internal (walled garden) blogs. I should have/could have cross-posted on Journey with Technology, but didn’t do that until I moved to my current school. Sometimes, my blog goes out, but I invariably resurrect it from the ashes. Usually this happens because I am inspired to share in this format by a blog post that I’ve read.

Curating/Consuming Blogs

I read many blog posts. In my must reads list are A Learning a Day, Practical Theory, User Generated Education, Seth’s Blog, Techcrunch, The Official Google Blog, Langwitches, Never Ending Search, Detoxinista, etc. I subscribe to them using Feedly, and read them in Feedly on my laptop, or Reeder 3 on my iPhone/iPad. I am subscribed to too many blogs, and have been working on removing subscriptions to the ones that add the least value to my work/self development at the moment. One of the things that I’ve been working on is to make more regular comments to blogs, or to share the content with others. I often share blog posts or the content of blog posts with colleagues that I think would benefit.

Blogging in 2017

One of my goals for 2017 is to blog more regularly. Before I found out about this challenge, I had already created a goal of blogging at least once a week. Being part of this challenge will provide me with a prompt to help me meet that goal. When I get busy, my blogging time is one of the first things to disappear from my schedule. I will reschedule it rather than deleting it from my schedule when there are conflicts this year. I’d also like to work on my blog roll, and make sure that I regularly engage with those blogs, so I will schedule that on a monthly basis as well.

The advice that I would give my younger self would be to blog regularly, and to engage with colleagues, the community of bloggers and with twitter chats for ideas to blog about.

Seth Godin and Tom Peters explains why you should blog, and what they get from blogging (H/T to Dangerously Irrelevant).

Note that this post is written for my participation in #EdublogsClub challenge. The prompt was to “write a post that shares your blog story”.