The adventure begins!

So I'm not new to blogging....

In 2007, my son Josh was born at 29 weeks and 6 days, weighing only 2 lbs, 10 oz.  He spent the first eight weeks of his life in the Neonatal ICU at Presbyterian Hospital.  While we were overwhelmed at first by the experience of having a preemie, my husband and I wanted to share his progress with concerned family members and friends in a way that was easy and inclusive.  So here on Blogger, I started a family blog.  I started it in late June 2007, just as I am starting this one.

In time, I got familiar with Blogger's format and became proficient with uploading photos, sharing links and stories, and making it part of my weekly tasks to update the blog.  To my surprise, we developed a loyal following from those family members and friends, and they would become quite demanding if I fell behind on updates!  Our son came home, grew into a funny little boy, and our family expanded with the adoption of our daughter Laura in late 2009.  This process was also documented through our blog.

I finally retired the family blog in 2014.  Keeping up with it regularly and posting about our family life became a bit redundant with all the other ways we share information (Facebook, etc) and we didn't have as much to report, besides.  If you'd like to see my old blog, feel free to peruse:  joshhudenko.blogspot.com.

I think blogging is a very useful medium for connecting people, but I also find it frustrating because reaching anyone outside a known audience (family, friends) is quite difficult unless you wish to involve the use of ads, promotional tools, etc.  Blogging is not unlike journaling aloud.... many people seem to use it as a public diary of sorts.  That can become problematic if a person begins to overshare--readers may feel they are burdened with more information about the writer than they originally sought.  Also, there's the unavoidable tenet that the Internet is very permanent--once information or photos are shared, they're always out there.

I never worried much about security when writing my family blog.  My in-laws, on the other hand, cautioned me about including any information about our home address or where our children attended school, in case someone might want to hurt us or kidnap the kids.  Seriously!  But I do think that in the day and age of sharing daily occurrences over social media, people should at least consider that there are predators out there on the Internet, looking for ways to scam unsuspecting users for their identifying information, and maybe even plotting to do worse.

I also considered for a time creating a separate blog as a way to practice writing and recording personal thoughts.  I've never been much of a journal-keeper, but I've often wondered if my writing skills might improve if I became one.  For a small while, I did contribute occasional essays to Open Salon; the responses I received to a few of them were quite gratifying.  Ultimately, I decided a blog would not be the best forum to practice writing, simply due to the feeling of writing for an audience, even if no one read it.  I think I felt I needed to make some progress with my writing ability in a truly private forum before I could be ready for an audience, present or not.

Some of my favorite blogs have been humor/entertainment blogs such as www.awesomelyluvvie.com, or art blogs like myprintmakingjourney.blogspot.com.  These bloggers have a good sense of how long a post should be and which elements to include that keep the post interesting, like photos, GIFs, and graphics.  I learned as I wrote for my family blog that photos were preferable to long stretches of text; many of my followers really checked our blog for photos more than anything else.  Many of our friends who were becoming parents around the same time started family blogs also, and I discovered that I enjoyed the ones with lots of large, well-placed photos more than the ones that droned on with text and only a few small photos.

That being said, I think I have droned on long enough in this post!  Until next time, when I begin my critique of Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?, thanks for reading and have a lovely day.

Amy