More than 7 Links: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Thanks to ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s 7-Link Challenge, I’m back in the blogging saddle after a monthlong gap created by vacation, its catching-up aftermath, the Fourth of July weekend, and various other excuses. Good thing I have that day job.

This looked easy when I first read the list but has turned out to be work. It would be even more work if I were to take that 7-link business as a constraint. I didn’t.

Your first post: Actually my first three posts since apparently I hadn’t yet figured out how to create posts as their own individual pages for archiving…. A fairly lame start to the whole enterprise, really, with wildly varying tone and topic.

That’s what you get when you start a blog just to find out how much work it is to write a blog, rather than having decided on a purpose, a voice, and a central theme. Oh well. Maybe I can serve as a bad example for beginning bloggers so I feel useful.

As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, it's also quite amusing to read a two-year-old statement that I'm on Twitter "very seldom." How was I to know?

A post you enjoyed writing the most: This one is a toss-up. I note that these are all family posts; I write about public policy, bike commuting and active transportation and a lot of miscellany but clearly I like my quirky and quotable family members best. Contenders are:

• Part I: Getting to Know My 14-Year-Old--or Trying. Very Trying.
• Part II: Becoming a Woman, and Boys Boys Boys: More Time with Younger Daughter
• Sweetie and the Poo Rock
• Thank you for the Belly Laughs, Marie Osmond
• Shameless Application of Feminine Wiles in the Name of Hash Browns
• Kate and the Tomato Soup Incident

A post which had a great discussion:

• I'm part Dutch, you know: What do YOU wear to bike? was fun because of the biking wardrobe discussion.
• 3 Things My Mother Taught Me had beautiful comments from family members.
• I like the way some people went metaphorical and some literal on comments in The Zen of Fingernails: Giving Up Attachment
• Mom frmrnyis because it was the first post in which I connected with another blogger I'd been reading via comments--it meant so much to me!

A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs on Twitter) writes far too infrequently on her personal blog. A (Sort of) Sentimental Post that I Tried to Make Less So is a beautiful meditation on parenthood.

Your most helpful post: 

Public sector communications job applications 101 and its Twitter twin Real-time reviews of job applicants, or, I can be brutally honest. Just watch.

A post with a title that you are proud of: 

Social media: Drinking from the firehose, being the ocean and Sweeping generalizations are always false, Mr. Professional Traffic Engineer (yes, I totally get the oxymoron—it’s deliberate)

A post that you wish more people had read: Again, tough to choose.

• Raised by Wolves, or Free Range Kids? Either Way, They Learn and Live. At Least So Far. For every wrap-your-kid-in-cotton-wool parent.
• Overdoing: The Seven-Course Meal Approach to Life: Actually, this is the one I need to reread every so often.
• Yet another 11 little secrets: Advice for life that is actually pretty darn good.

As I paged back through my archives I thought of other categories not worth linking to, but quite evident in my blog:

• Posts of no possible interest to anyone other than your own mother (and her only on a good day even before she got dementia)
• Posts demonstrating that you have not yet settled on any kind of consistency in topic or publishing schedule necessary to attract honest-to-goodness readers and subscribers
• Posts demonstrating that doing a round-up of links to blog posts you find interesting is a guaranteed way to get zero comments, at least on this blog
• Posts with recipes even though this isn’t a food blog
• Posts demonstrating that apparently at some point I changed my title capitalization style without noticing, despite having been a copy editor in one guise or another for the past 20 years, and that even though I have now noticed this I’m not going to spend the time to make it consistent
• And posts like this one demonstrating that after nearly two years I still can't get consistent spacing or typefaces in Blogger because I get tired of poking at the HTML crap created by Word copy/paste as my eyes get older and I should just give up and switch to WordPress but instead I just give up and go to bed. G'night.