Category: things I like

… and we are off. The first, shiny new blog post of the year is here!

I hope you had a restful end to 2022 and are looking forward to what 2023 may bring. I am still on holiday, having taken some overdue leave and I am enjoying the extra rest. It’s giving me time to catch up with my thoughts, do some exercise and celebrate my partner’s birthday with a trip to the coast.

Back to blogging. Literally. I am kicking off my year of blogging by writing about blogging: for the first time in a few years, I have set up a new space for me to write in. A counterpart to this one, my primary domain, which offers me a private space for articulating my thoughts.

Two spaces?

It’s actually more than two spaces to write in, as I like to write a lot. I have paper based and digital journals, in which I write with blue and black ink and I like the speed of writing with a fountain pen as well as the sound it makes. A noise I had forgotten for a while.

I also have plenty of digital spaces to write in, mostly work-related, from social media, others’ platforms and this site, my own space.

It’s useful for me to have more than one space, as it helps me write about the different things I am interested in, and with different readers in mind.

Most people know me online through my day job, and they may not necessarily want to read about lots of unrelated things. I have tried in the past to bring everything I do together, but over time I have found that having separate spaces works better for me.

Why private?

This is a topic I have written about before, as I have always had different degrees of openness in my practice. It helps me to have a private space: it makes me feel safe to be completely honest, to write things down that I am still puzzling out, and to have a space to work through doubts or worries. It also gives me a space to revel in being me.

Most importantly, I find it fun to set up a new space for myself. It gives me a wonderful sense of turning over a new leaf. It’s the start of something.

I came across something I blogged about in 2018, about how completing something fun is an important part of my practice:

As often as I can, I dedicate some time to doing something fun. For example, I enjoy making a web page and publishing it. Or making an image for something. Or reading/writing something. It doesn’t really matter what it is, it’s about completing it and getting a sense of achievement from it. A quick win. A lot of what I work on is a) long term, b) invisible or c) collaborative and so in order to balance these with feeling that I have accomplished something I often do ‘something fun’ and see it completed. It reminds me of how good I am at making things happen and often helps me see bigger, more complex things through to completion with a greater sense of confidence.

Setting up a new space to write ticks all those boxes. It’s a quick win. It’s fun. It gives me a sense to have achieved something and it’s only the 3rd January…

It’s Monday and the temperature outside has plummeted to (for UK standards) freezing temperatures. Since the start of this month I have blogged more often again, aiming for a post on most weekdays. In the best tradition of the medium, I am going to blog about blogging today.

Why now?

During the recent [insert your own word here] on Twitter, and a subsequent re-activation of my Mastodon account, I was reading some really interesting reflections on what folk were hoping to leave behind (on Twitter), what they were hoping to find and contribute to (on Mastodon) and what they aim for overall with their digital presence.

It made me feel both sad and hopeful. Most of all, it made me consider what it is that I WANT from my time here on the internet.

Not the activities that are part of my day job for which I need to maintain profiles on particular platforms, but those parts that are shaped by what I want to do and who I want to interact with.

Which brought me back to my own domain, this space, that for many years has been my own platform, unchanged by the ebbs and flows of digital fortunes.

Thanks to Reclaim Hosting (#4life) I have long been able to administrate and safeguard my own space, giving me a channel for my own voice, my things, my creativity and projects.

What am I hoping for?

My blog has a regular readership in the hundreds, so not particularly huge, and I mostly blog for myself. Sometimes to curate resources to refer to, sometimes to share practical tips, but largely it’s a space for me to think about what I am interested in and share parts of that.

In 2020 I really struggled for what to say. Work kept going, but my professional practice was so dominated by the crisis response, that I found it hard to articulate anything.

Since then, I have published a lot on different platforms, but most of it is very much directed at the work I do, focused on projects like my book or specific events.

More recently, with the Twitter/Mastodon conversation in full swing, I came to the conclusion that I need to blog more. To hear my own voice represented here. I am not sure yet whether I really ‘need’ another social media platform, federated or otherwise, but I do want my own space to be alive and kicking. I started blogging more than 20 years ago (and I can’t believe that I am old enough for that to be true) and I am grateful that I can continue that practice here, on my own domain.