blogging | XingfuMama

Not long before Christmas I got a “congratulations your blog is three years old” email from WordPress. I was busy and it didn’t really register at the time. But recently I realized that my “about” page is 3 years old and should be updated. Among other things I use a different camera now.

It is easy to decide you need to update something, but, at least for me, much harder to figure out what to say. An awful lot has changed since I started this blog. I am very much the same person, and interested in the same things, but the time of life I am in is shifting. Another thing that is shifting is that I feel more competent.

I have really grown through being exposed to the many voices in the WordPress community and also from trying to respond to the challenges prompts people post. Cee’s Compose Yourself course was a real boost to my skills, and I have read many other excellent articles and seen a lot of wonderful pictures that have helped me learn. Seeing how other people respond and think has helped me to find my own voice.

I’m still trying to figure out what to say on an “about” page but I do know that I want to say “Thank you!” to all of the bloggers on WordPress. This has been, and continues to be a rewarding experience.

There is a group called “cheer peppers” that has a challenge called “Nano Poblano”. I never did figure out what the Chemistry formula-like acronym stood for, but the challenge is to post every day in November. I know that some people post everyday and don’t think anything of it, but for me it is difficult.

I am a disorganized rebel who likes to do things start to finish. The idea of posting everyday for a month was intimidating. For some reason I was intrigued, especially after reading this article: Why Blog Every Day in November? I had a backlog of thoughts and images from my travels this fall so I thought “maybe I can do this”. Since I am a bit superstitious I didn’t say anything about the goal publicly and I didn’t do any of the signing up, because I really didn’t think I could do it.

Good thing since I didn’t quite pull it off: I missed three days. Of those two were because I did not have internet access for my PC over Thanksgiving and I haven’t figured out the smartphone app, the third was because I lost momentum. However, With this post I have published 30 posts in the month of November. I am a little proud because the month included my grandma taking a fall and spending a bunch of time at the hospital and nursing home (more of that to come).

I learned some useful things: one was how to schedule a post in advance. I was planning to use that to get through the holiday week without a hitch, but Grandma’s fall meant that I didn’t have time to set that up.

One other thing I did was to explore and create a list of several challenges that I can use to figure out what to post. I call it my “Post It Notes“. It contains links to the websites with the challenges. I print it out each week and use it to track themes and make notes so I can see how I am doing. A cool thing about these challenges is to see what other people are doing with the same theme and connect with them. I don’t always use one of them but they are great if I am stuck for an idea. I am really grateful to the creative people who create and maintain these challenges. The cyber world is a much more friendly place because of them.

One thing I missed this month: I have had less time to read other peoples blogs. Because of this I don’t plan to continue to post everyday, but using my “Post-It Notes” and scheduling I can do much better than I was doing before Nano Poblano. Thank you, Cheer Peppers!

Exploring my world with pictures and words.