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Pad Patter 6/8: Personal/Creative Blogging

jenevang

jenevang

Rocking a two-piece under my scrubs
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Joined
Apr 20, 2011
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Sigh. I've been wanting to restart my personal blogging. It has been on my To-Do list since January. I thought I could merge my personal and scrap blogs together since both of them are months and months out of date right now :(.

Every time I have a story to tell, I think about it. Then feel silly sharing my life online like that. Then feel silly about feeling silly about that, hehe. The bottom line is that I become paralyzed.

I use FB as my "blog" right now but my in-laws who live across the country from us are not on FB and they loved my blog when I kept it up. It was a great way to share the grandkids with them. So, why am I so hesitant?

Do you have a blog? Personal? Creative? Both?

Tell me about it. How often do you update it? Why do you continue it? Is it worth my time to re-vitalize mine? Is blogging a lost art, being replaced by Social Media?

Just wondering about this so thought I'd throw it out there to my Lilypad Peeps.
 
I had (have) a blog but it completely fell by the wayside. I have thought about setting up and using my behance site that came with my ps/lr subscription instead of trying to resurrect my blog. (By bad I mean there are baby pictures of Reed...and he turns 6 next week)

I think I might like that better because I could do pages and recipes and projects/invitations - it would be a photo gallery with the posts as the text when you click to view the photo better... (And it uploads straight from Lightroom once it's set up). (I am no help, lol!)
 
My blog has a constant, ongoing identity crisis. I started it many, many years ago when I started CT work, so it was mainly a creative space. Then I found out that it was a good way to keep up with out of town relatives (pre-fb), and although I still showed my layouts, it became more personal. Then, once I got more hooked in with Facebook, it began to be a bit ignored. Lately I've been trying to keep it going by posting my PL layouts... but I have to say, my blog is quite a bore and no one really (not even family) visits it anymore. I'm trying to figure out what it is that I want to do with it. I've had it so long that I hate to abandon it... but then I also question the point of keeping it... sigh.
 
for a lot of people, a blog is their website. for me it is that way. i use it to talk about everything i do. my etsy business, my scrapbooking, creative stuff, and i am trying to be better at sharing more personal stuff. i recently switched from a blog that was named after just my etsy store, to a new blog that encompasses all that i do, so i could just update one blog and have everything under one "roof".

i took a few blogging classes in the past and learned that people like to come to a blog and get a sense of who you are as a person, not just what you do and what you create. sharing a bit of yourself is important i think. i don't think i do it enough, and sometimes it feels silly to write personal stuff ... but i know when i read other's blogs ... i like their silly stories. so ...

social media has deft'ly changed blogging ... i don't read as many blogs as i used to bc it is just easier to follow people and bizs on FB, but i think for anyone with a business it is still essential to have some presence on the web outside of social media. you have more control over things and not everyone is on social media as you mentioned. so that is why i do it.

for you jen, i think being able to share with family not on FB, is a great reason to go for it again. even if you post infrequently, who cares? if you only do it for personal reasons it is not as important to keep up regularly IMHO. i say do it!
 
I have a blog that I've kept up to some extent for many years now. I haven't been so great at keeping up until recently and am trying desperately to do better. Since I started scrapbooking, I am very thankful for telling my stories on my blog because I can go back to when I posted the picture (back then I shot, edited and posted pretty much all in the same day, or within a couple of days) and remember the story that goes with it. What started out as a personal blog has morphed into a catchall for everything... there's some personal there, and some creative stuff, too.
 
I have a blog that I update randomly. I do really well for short bursts of time and then I fall behind again. It's a little of both...scrapping stuff with some RL stuff thrown in here and there. I would love to keep it up more regularly, but I need to find a way to work it in to my routine.
 
I've had a TP blog for a really long time, started moving everything and transitioning to WP back in 2012, didn't get quite halfway done and then just quit. Both blogs have just kinda sat there idle ever since. I made plans at the start of the year to finish the transition to WP once my Spring semester ended because I really do love blogging and have missed it, just haven't made it a priority yet and the semester ended a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully I'll get to it soon. :)

And I agree with Jen, "being able to share with family not on FB, is a great reason to go for it again. even if you post infrequently, who cares? if you only do it for personal reasons it is not as important to keep up regularly ... "

I say go for it, too! :)
 
You guys are inspiring me. I'm gonna do it. Tomorrow :rofl
 
i started a blog when the kids were little. We were living in Michigan, I wasn't working outside of the home, I had plenty of time. And lots of funny stories and such to share.

2 moves later, kids growing up and busy, and a job outside of the home. My blogging status is something altogether different. I love the idea of resurrecting my blog and breathing life back into it. And maybe I will. But I feel like the kids are old enough now that many of their stories are THEIR stories to tell. I feel I need to respect their privacy and not share it all with every friend and family member we have. Plus, there's just not tons of free time to be found. Ever. And quite frankly, I would rather be doing something else with my free time than feeling obligated to blog.
 
I answered and then went back through and read everyone's answers. I agree... my blog fell by the wayside when social media took a more prominent position in life.

I struggle with keeping it going, but I hate the idea of abandoning it.

And my favorite thing to do is share pictures - of our daily lives, trips, activities, whatever. But it seems to take SO long to resize, save, upload, format, blah blah blah. And then I come right back around to struggling with using up all of my free time on blogging to share a few pictures. *sigh*
 
sigh. my blog hasn't been loved on since 2012 (except for the resume side). just not enough time to keep up with it... maybe that's a good thing meaning life is full! ;)
 
Rebecca...I'm right there with you. I even find that now that the kids are older (and on social media themselves), I share less and less even on fb. They are their stories to tell and they are so easily embarrassed at this age. I share a lot less everywhere these days.

I also feel PL has also harmed my desire to blog. I don't want to blog pictures of our daily stuff if I'm also sharing PL pages that contain the exact same photos. For example... why would I blog about my daughter's dance recital when I just included all of my favorite pics of it on a PL page I have ready to post? I used to not scrap chronologically, so event photos I shared on my blog wouldn't necessarily get scrapped for months and I didn't feel like I was being too repetitious since a lot of time had passed. With PL, the event and the page are just too close together.

I guess for now I'm going to just keep sharing my PL spreads, just to keep momentum going until I figure out what I really want to do with it.
 
Oh ... personal blogging ... do. not. start. me. on. it. Manz !!!

I started blogging with xanga.com ... right abt the same time my marriage was breaking down. So it was a way to vent, to "talk" to someone. I was very active in it. Then I switched over to blogspot. And still was very active. When I started to become a mother of a growing son, it was my online diary. I blogged abt everything - single motherhood, work, my mum, my personal thots, etc. I still blog in it. Last entry was March 2014.

When I started digi-scrapbooking, I started a blog for it in 2005. Then it went into a coma. When I chanced upon TLP in 2011, I revived it. And it is still alive.

When my Maltese dog was diagnosed 100% blind in Jan 2008, I started a blog for her. My last entry was in Sept 2011 when she was PTS.

Then the craze for mineral eyeshadow hits my shore in April 2008. I started another blog just for it. Cos I was crazy enuf to wear es everyday to work. Even if it was hideous-looking = yellow on yellow, blue on blue, etc. Last entry was June 2011

Then in 2009, I wanna keep track of my finished cross-stitch projects. I decided to start a blog for it as well. The deciding factor was I restarted on a Precious Moment Noah's Ark project for a gf which was clsoe to 2 years overdue. :giggle. Last entry was in July 2010 after I had completed a birthday project.

Right abt the same time, my mum picked up a hamster outside my flat which started me on a Hamster Blog. And it was active until Feb 2014 when my last hamster died.

As with most of you, all of my blogs are dormant. Except for the SB blog. I did make an effort to revive my personal blog. But I find posting to fb as an newsflash-thingy is more "fun" than blogging. Plus I had kinda grown up & matured thus not wanting to share my personal outbursts/setbacks/disasters online. So that is main reason why I'm neglecting my personal blog.
 
I have a blog. A bit neglected. It started with scrapping, and my journey to learn new things. I get a lot of hits still on my tutorials. I posted links to FB and was going to transition to FB, but I didn't have the interest that I was looking for. This past year, I pinned a bunch of my tutorials to Pinterest, and that took off well...jumped! But... I never started blogging again or sharing my tutorials. I think I'm pretty good at it, it's just timing, and other stuff I'd rather be doing.

So... I'd like to get my tutorials posted - I think I have about 50 stockpiled to post that randomly were used for newsletter articles I've written, CT designer blog posts, CT store posts, and such. I wanted them all to be in one location for me, lol! If anyone wants to see... it's The Typative Scrapper.

Maybe... eventually.... hmmmm... writing this makes me want to start it again, lol!
 
my personal blog has been totally niglected... my creative blog I recently revived after feeling called to do it. I consider it more of a ministry blog by offering tutorials rather than just sharing my projects. I felt called though, to share my expertise otherwise I wouldn't do it... my personal blog I feel no reason to keep it up just because of social media

IMO, if you feel like you should, then do it, knowing that your in-laws will read it, I think that would be the best reason to revive it :)
 
I haven't updated mine in forever. There are just so many now, and I think people don't read them as much as they used to, so it's hard to get motivated. I always have all these high hopes, though.
 
I have never been the most prolific or consistent blogger. It started many many moons ago when my babies were babies and I was diagnosed with cancer (almost 7 years cancer free now!) and it was a way for me to process all that and keep friends and family from afar up to date. I continued sharing photos, scrapbook pages and lots and lots of stories. Once I started teaching two years ago, I think I have posted like less than 20 times......BUT, one goal for summer is start sharing again there regularly. It means a lot to my parents and grandparents and the aunts that live far away and one day I started clicking back through my blog and realized that I shared a lot of stuff that I don't necessarily document through PL or scrapbook pages--yes, there is some overlap, but I realized that it was part sharing stories, part therapeutic processing for me. And I want to actually print out some of the years' posts to add to my project life albums because they most definitely are a part of our lives.
And I don't really Facebook or Instagram with any regularity.
I say do it for your family that is far away! I know that I love reading my sister's since we live so far away and even though we communicate by text/phone almost every day, I still get insights into their life that I don't get from that communication.
 
I used to blog a lot. It wasn't so much about me, but it was a lot of my fiction and poetry writing... back when I was a bit naive about the world. But then I was part of a writers' blog hop. I found out one of the people was going back in my blog and basically stealing my writing. So I pulled all of that stuff out and put it into private mode, which didn't leave much. During my grad school writing program, I didn't keep up with my blog because I had to write so much for that. LOL. And then while I've been doing grad school for education, I don't really have much to blog about.

When I started scrapping, I shared some layouts there, but then when I *really* got into scrapping, I was blogging for other places, so I lost the motivation to blog for myself. And now I'm kind of in the same boat as others... I think who really wants to read about my stories/thoughts/ideas so I just don't really do it other than to participate in a PL blog hop (when I can remember).

Some days I think I should just go back and start. If nothing else, I could always use it as a quasi-diary/journal since no one really reads it anyway. LOL. I can jot down funny things that Kennedy says or things that we're dealing with on a regular basis just to have it for documentation's sake. I love reading Ali Edwards' blog and seeing stories about her life and things she writes about her kids. I think about how they will be able to go back and read all of that in the future. So maybe it is a good idea. And at some point, I'm going to be holding writing workshops, so it would probably be a good thing to start/build back up.

I dunno... I guess that is just a lot of blah blah. Hahhaha. I definitely think you other people should blog though. :D
 
LOL. I love your post, Kimberlee. "I definitely think you other people should blog though" EPIC :)

As an update... I'm working on a Wix.com site. Will have a blog and my creative galleries there. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of my WP blog but it looks pretty and is SUPER easy to set up (don't have to mess w/ all that code I'm not super good at). We'll see how it goes...

I'll link you up when it's live!
 
scrapsandsass said:
Some days I think I should just go back and start. If nothing else, I could always use it as a quasi-diary/journal since no one really reads it anyway. LOL. I can jot down funny things that Kennedy says or things that we're dealing with on a regular basis just to have it for documentation's sake. I love reading Ali Edwards' blog and seeing stories about her life and things she writes about her kids. I think about how they will be able to go back and read all of that in the future. So maybe it is a good idea.
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Kimberlee, I've been thinkin the same thing too. Just revive it for documentation sake.

Then my next qtn wud be it make it public or private? Cos If I "read" it correctly, most of my readers are gfs (SAHM / working mums) whom have now converted to fb. And I know most of their personal blogs had died off too. So if I were to blog for myself, why make it public.

To be frank, I doubt there's a readership thingy going on for my SB-blog. But I just like the idea of it being on display, iykwim.
 
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