Dawn Near the Bay of Bengal by Joisey Showaa
Welcome to the new and improved Beth’s Blog! After almost a decade of blogging and most of it at the same place, I’m starting over with a new platform and look thanks to Allyson Kapin and Jared Seltzer of Rad Campaign .
Moving to this new blog put me in a reflective mood. I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for almost a decade and seven years over at Beth’s Blog. According to the stats in Typepad, my blog has had:
- 1206701: Lifetime Pageviews
- 3129: Total Posts
- 7641: Total Comments
My very first blog was about my trip to Cambodia to bring my son Harry home in February, 2000. I hand coded the html myself! A year later, I launched my first professional blog on the software that eventually became Google’s blogger. I wrote about nonprofits, technology, and training.
In those early days, I lacked the discipline and inspiration to keep blogging on a regular basis. I had a couple of false starts. In April, 2003, I started blogging on my http://beth.typepad.com in April, 2003 soon after Six Apart launched its TypePad hosting service.
My very first blog post was called “Blogspiration” and I shared my goal of blogging regularly. I revisited some of my first posts and, ironically, my early blog posts were very short, some only a few sentences, a pre-shadowing of micro-blogging that would come into its own a few years later.
I did not form the blogging daily habit until January, 2004 because we had just added to our family. That post was magical because it was the first comment I had received and that comment was from a Cambodian Bloggher, Tharum. His comment inspired me to start a personal blog on Cambodian culture and connect with other Cambodian bloggers.
I had outgrown my information design as well as my blogging platform a couple years ago. It had become increasingly difficult to find older posts because I have too many categories and an idiosyncratic way of organizing them. If it was hard for me to find content, than I can’t imagine how what it is like for you, the readers. Allison Fine once joked that my blog was like entering the portal in Being John Malkovich.
I really needed a professional web/blog designer! In April, I hired Allyson Kapin and Jared Seltzer of Rad Campaign who lead me through a blog redesign process and set me up on the Word Press platform. They did a fantastic job and I highly recommend them!
They created a cleaner version of Beth’s Blog with less clutter, but still retains my personality. They listened to me about my important goals for the look and feel: authenticity, conversation, generosity, and fun! (One feature is that my photo in the side bar will change according to different themes, so stay tuned)
I will keep the old Beth’s Blog as an archive, so I can start fresh over here. As I enter this new journey in blogging, I’m inspired to work on improving my writing so that my blog is more effective at helping networked nonprofits use social media to power change.
What do you think of my new blog?
