New Blog Who This: A Reflection on My Blogging Journey and How I Got Here

As we quickly approach March and the upcoming Slice of Life challenge it seems as good a time as any to switch blogging platforms all together. It's funny, but while I believe Wordpress was my first "professional" blog (and I use that term loosely), it was not my first time locating an online platform to use for my writing needs.  

That honor belongs to the days in high school when I flitted back and forth between platforms like Xanga and LiveJournal.  Those were the days when keeping an online journal was THE thing to do for nerdy high school girls.  This was before the days of places like Tumblr.  I thrived there, shared my thoughts there, and posted some of the most dramatic, purple prose you can imagine.  And by that I mean fanfiction.  Mostly, however, Livejournal was my first online diary.

I don't blog like that any more.  At least, I don't feel the need to keep a semi-public online diary (one could argue places like Facebook and Twitter have taken on that role).  However, I am trying to get back into the habit of blogging.  

For awhile I tried my hand at Wordpress -- hoping to carve a place for myself on the internet to share my thoughts as a teacher.  That's how the Wordpress blog started -- the name of it should be indication enough of that.  I thought I would use it as a place to record teaching ideas and moments in the classroom.  

That didn't last long.  Very quickly, my Wordpress blog drifted away from teaching and, instead, became a place to host my nonfiction writing in general: mostly poetry and slices.  

However, even that fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons.  It didn't help that Wordpress itself began to feel unwieldy and unnecessarily complicated.  I abandoned ship, but instead of switching to a new platform I just abandoned blogging all together.

I thought I was done with blogging, but I will say I do get some pleasure from challenges.  My writing community has helped with that one and I found myself wishing I had a space dedicated to sharing my writing, but also a place to house writing I do for other blogs.  

This week, it's EthicalELA -- I have posted several poems each time there is a challenge and would hate to lose those to the internet.  Keep an eye out for an upcoming post where I share those.  Soon, it will be the annual month-long Slice of Life challenge I mentioned at the start of this post.  

I'm sure there will be other opportunities as well.  The point is I needed a fresh start, a fresh blog, and a renewed purpose.  I think this platform and blog can serve those needs nicely.