NaBloPo: My Blogging Backstory!

 

It's a chilly but otherwise chill Friday up in here.  What to write about today...ooh I know.  Let's kind of pick up where we left off at the end of my cooking backstory and talk about what I'm doing here in the first place.

For all things NaBloPo head over to The Inbetween in Mine

As best as I can remember, I became aware of blogs in the mid-2000s. At the time I regularly traveled to Toronto for work, so I read the Globe and Mail online to keep up with current events.  They had a feature where normal people wrote personal essays that I couldn't get enough of.  A favorite that stood out was a woman who was working a boring temp job and found herself coping by compulsively eating packages of hot chocolate mix from the office break room.  Yes you heard me, she was not compulsively drinking hot chocolate, she was eating the mix straight and having to sneak around from kitchen to kitchen in the building to hide her habit.  I read that and thought "yes!  I can totally relate!!!!!"  She wrote a few more similar essays and one day I googled her and found that she had a website where she wrote about this and that - you know, a blog.  Jennifer has changed her internet home a few times, and the current best way to hang out with her is on Instagram.  I think she's the blogger that I've followed the longest.  The #2 slot belongs to Madam X at My Open Wallet.

For the longest time I followed personal finance blogs and then cooking blogs started working their way into the rotation.  Smitten Kitchen, How Sweet Eats, and Brown Eyed Baker are the long term standouts.

By now it's January 2011.  It was my boss's birthday and we were having an office party for him.  He'd mentioned apple pie in conversation and I'd seen an apple pie recipe that looked tasty, so I whipped one up for the party.  On a whim I pulled out a camera and started taking pictures and put together a Google photo album with humorous comments documenting the process.

The other thing about that job is that we always ate lunch together at work so we were all brown bagging.  As you know, I was well along in my cooking journey at this point so I was getting a lot of comments on my lunchbox.  "Hey that looks good, can you give me the recipe?".  If I could remember, I'd email them links to recipes and try to write "OK here's what I started with but I didn't have [x ingredient] so I did this instead..." and I thought it would be convenient to have a place where I could keep those notes and share recipes...like maybe one of those bloggy blogs that I liked reading.

I researched a list of things that I needed to know:

• I googled where and how to get a blog, and not surprisingly Google said Blogger.
• Was it OK to share someone else's recipes?  I didn't need anyone to tell me that of course you always give credit to the original source and that you always use your own words and your own photos (what can I say, my mamma raised me right), but was it OK to include the recipes themselves?  Google said yes, because a list of ingredients cannot be copyrighted.  A chocolate chip cookie is a chocolate chip cookie and the words "2 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of baking soda" are free for all.  Yes I saw it all very clear in black and white but I wanted to test the waters first so I thought I'd leave my name off the blog to start with...for reasons that we'll come back to this was the best blogging decision that I've ever made.
• I already had pictures from the pie so I had the foundation for a first post and a handful of ideas for other posts.  I figured I was good for about 10 posts and wouldn't worry about where I'd go from there.
  
• Oh crap I gotta call the blog something....at this point the process stopped cold for a few months.  Like seriously what???  Finally I sat myself down and came up with a working title to tide me along until I could come up with a better idea (spoiler: as of the current date 11 years later this has not happened yet).  Even though I wasn't putting my name on it, I wanted some piece of "me" and I was proud of my little house on Birchwood Street.  My first post was going to be a pie.  The Something Project (The Runway Project?  The Alan Parsons Project?) was in my mind at the time.  That's good enough, we have liftoff.

I mussed and fussed with my pie pictures and finally clicked publish.

That's pretty much all there is to say for phase one of blogging.  I wrote any time that I had an idea and the time to photograph it.  I shared the content freely with friends and coworkers who wanted to know what was in my lunchbox.

The next phase of my blog consuming history was fitness blogs.  I saw an article that mentioned a blog called Losing Weight in the City (no longer active, but you can follow Theodora on Insta) and one day I googled 20 minute treadmill workouts which is how I found Julie at Peanut Butter Fingers.  The thing that I liked about fitness blogs besides, well fitness, is that the bloggers were giving more detail into their day to day lives.  I'm just a human being who's trying to figure it out, so I really appreciated reading about other humans who were just trying to figure it out.  I thought about writing about other things besides recipes but I couldn't figure out quite what.

And then it's 2014 and I'm about to finish grad school and take the CPA exam just for yuks.  With all due respect, there are a billion CPAs in this world so the internet should be chock full of real life experiences on what it's like to take the exam, right?  But I couldn't find anything and that really bugged me.  I decided that I was going to Tell All when it was done, but where was I going to tell it?  On a food blog?  Yeah sure, why not.  I tagged the post "off-topic" (if you're curious enough you can find it but please be cautious since if you're not a CPA or planning to be a CPA there is a high risk that reading that post will make your eyes bleed).

After getting the CPA I went in search of a higher level job and the thought occurred to me "hey it's kind of a good thing that when people google me all they see is boring CPA stuff and not my silly recipe blog"  That was kind of the turning point where I stopped telling people about the blog, and just let it be my little slice of the internet.  My family and a few friends plus anyone who remembers that chick who made the apple pie at work 10 years ago know about the blog, and that's it.

I never stopped blogging, but over time it became less rewarding to come up with recipe ideas and photograph them.  I wanted to do something else but I wasn't sure what.  One thing that I liked about How Sweet Eats and Brown Eyed Baker was that they did weekly posts where they gave highlights from their lives and talked about the TV shows that they were watching and also had a weekly post where they linked to recipes on other blogs that looked interesting to them.  Hmmm, could this be the something else?  The only thing is that I didn't want to link to recipes that I hadn't actually made.  And also thank you very much, I wanted to know what other bloggers were eating day to day...hold up, I've just found something that I want that I can't find on the internet, yep that's a sign that I need to be the thing that I'm looking for.  And maybe if I wrote about food I'd get better at meal planning for my family.  The idea took shape: I'd write about what I ate from day to day, my workouts (a nod to the fitness blogs), what I was watching, and what I was reading.  Oh hey first weekly eats post!

That brings us to current times.  Occasionally I'll come up with a one off idea and of course when I got reeeeally in to running I did separate weekly posts for that, but that's kind of how and why we're here.  Last year I had Job Drama and at first I said nothing and pretended that everything was hunky dory and then I realized hey even on the 0.0000001% chance that my then-employer knew about the blog they knew that I was pissed and on my way out the door so there was no reason to keep secrets anymore.  And also I needed an extra place to blow off steam in addition to anyone who would listen to me.  There was someone from the distant past at the disaster-of-a-job-after-that so that's why my job search last summer stayed off the blog until it was a done deal.  I'm at the point now where I should be able to say what I wanna say in this space and still be employable IRL, so that's why you won't find my name but you get all of my "bad date" job interview stories.

What's the future?  I'll let you know when we get there.  Maybe I'll get into other subjects, maybe I'll get more techie and "do something" with the blog, or maybe I'll just keep writing about food once a week for the rest of my time on this earth.  Stay tuned.

Stuff that I think about blogging

• Shut the front door everyone who says blogging is dead.
• I'm not into "rules".  My favorite blogs don't stick to one theme and it doesn't matter how frequently someone blogs.  'Member the My Open Wallet blog that was one of the first blogs that I ever started following?  She publishes one post a year nowadays.  Hungry Runner Girl publishes 6 days a week, down from 7 days a week and has been doing it for over a decade.  Both of them show up in my Feedly.
  
• If you are making money from blogging, yay you!  I've got no problem with that.  For example, the fashion blog Jo-Lynne Shane is very useful to me because we have a similar body size and shape.  She makes money blogging, I save time and money buying clothes because her blog helps me know what sizes to get and what not to buy - it's win-win.  The only thing that I will say is that for every blog that makes it big there are thousands of others that just turn into click bait.  There's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing in it for me so I'm not reading any more and also that's why people say that blogging is dead.
  
• If you just blog because you love it, yay you!  I've never looked in to making money from mine and don't plan to.  Also unless AdBlock wants to be a sponsor, it would be very hypocritical of me to enable ads.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good.  There's no law that says that anyone has to put photos on their blog or that they have to be calendar worthy.  Did you notice how out of focus the picture of the apples is before I pointed it out just now?  I'll have you know that (1) that was a great photo for 2011 and (2) ain't nobody got time for that.  My writing style is that I blurt something out and then edit the crap out of it, which leads to interrupting myself a lot and gazzillions of typos, grammar errors, and unfinished thoughts.  I bet there are at least a dozen in this post alone.  If I publish and see a goof right away I'll correct it but otherwise I just laugh at myself and leave it alone.  Why?  Because otherwise I'd never publish anything.
  
• Technology is great but I'm kinda tapped out on new hobbies.  That's why I've stuck with good ol' blogger.  I know there are some glitches here and there but for the most part it works.
• I don't mean to be a pain by only allowing comments from Google accounts and moderating comments.  I only do that because after a while I couldn't keep up with the spam and I don't want someone posting a link to something malicious.  
• Related: thanks if you've ever left a comment on my blog especially since it may be something of a chore.  And if you don't leave a comment that's cool too!
• Should YOU start a blog?  If you want to, then YES PLEASE START A BLOG!!!!!!!!  Or start an Instragram...microblogging is still blogging.  It doesn't matter that there are one billion blogs out there because there will never be enough good blogs.
  

 Your turn: what's your blogging backstory????