This week, our challenge was to share our work online via a blog.

The blogging assignment

Creative Challenge – Blogging: Create a blog if you don’t have one, add a couple of posts reflecting on your experiences of this course.Then post the URL link to complete the assignment. If you already have a blog create a post about your experience in this course following the guidelines introduced this week.  Then post the URL link to complete the assignment. Use your digital skills developed so far in the course and try to be economical and efficient with your time.

I’ve failed miserably at being economical and efficient with my time, as I’ve decided to repost and elaborate upon each one of the course assignments here in this blog. This is as much for myself as for the assignment; the review and reflection has been a valuable part of the whole experience.

I haven’t been a consistent blogger, but I’ve had a blog since 2002. When I started blogging, the software of choice for self-hosted bloggers was still Greymatter, with Movable Type also gaining popularity. My first self-hosted blog ran on Movable Type and was primarily about pet health. It is still online but has been dormant for many years. This blog is also self-hosted and runs on WordPress. It is primarily a personal blog created for NaBloPoMo in November 2008, and my main topics have been my dogs and other pets and technology. I’m fairly active on my Tumblr blog (and what I post there often contains profanity or is otherwise not suitable for work or my main blog), and less so on my LiveJournal, which in recent years has just served as a place to crosspost from this blog.

I don’t struggle with combining the personal and professional—I’ve rarely ever blogged about work. At my last job, we briefly discussed whether we should have a company blog and decided against it. At my current job, the discussion has never taken place, and it probably won’t for some time. Or at least not until I think of a strong reason as to why we should start blogging, and I’m not sure there is one right now. I don’t believe that every business niche benefits from blogging.

So enough about the past, and on to the technical notes. Although the assignment allowed the use of an existing blog, I felt just a little bit bad about not having to actually create a new blog. So I took the opportunity to do a long overdue upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, installed the latest version of StudioPress’s Genesis framework, and changed to a new minimalist theme, Wintersong Pro. I did some minimal customizing of graphics and type size, and plan to change the fonts as soon as I pick some new favorites from Typekit.

I’m still unsure as to whether I’ll continue blogging regularly on this go-around. We’ll see what happens and if I still have more of interest to contribute to the glut of information on the ‘net.