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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:


A post which had a great discussion:



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.


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.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Barb -- This was fun to read, and I love you idea of a posting something of no possible interest to anyone other than your own mother! Love it.

    Thanks for the shout!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You didn't get zero comments. See?

    ReplyDelete

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