In lieu of their Member of the Week feature, CHBM wants us to pimp ourselves. As in why am I a darn good mommy blogger.
Here’s the problem – and lo, there are many others – I’m terrible at pimping myself in any capacity. I know what I’m good at in parenting, working, life, but I’ll be damned if I’m the one to say it. That would be bragging and bad manners – at least that’s how I was raised. Which certainly doesn’t go far in promoting my blog in any way.
So, I’ll try, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
First off, I have never considered myself a mommy-blogger. Which leads to my main “good mommy-blogger” point in my favor… Longevity.
I started writing online around ’94-’95. I lost most of my archives in great computer crashes and/or moves, so I only have my archives back to 2000. Well, that was college time – WAY before kids. Way before “blogging” too. I “journaled” online. It was hard too, in a non-user friendly way. Everything was coded by hand – each and every page – in notepad from scratch. It was then uploaded via ftp to wherever we had space – in my case I had free space with my AOL account. Each page had to be updated, as it was a page a day format, unlike most blogs nowadays with several entries on the front page. Which means, that you had to go into your previous entry and code it to link to the next, then go to your archives to link to the new entry, then of course there was the front page. And if you had links, etc, you had to add them to each and every page, unless you only had them on the front page. Frankly, a really large PITA. Eventually software came along that made things easier. And then came the blogging format, which caused no little debate among the online journaling community. But I was there.
So now – while I absolutely do write about my kids and parenting them, and my family as a whole, I also have a journalling past present and future that does not include them. I rant and rave on society, myself, headlines, marriage, etc. So – my question is? What is a mommy-blogger? And am I one? Is it blogger + children = mommy-blogger? or is it blogger who only writes about their kids/parenting = mommy-blogger? I don’t know. I actually wiki’d it, and they don’t have a definition either.
Anyway, my number one “good” mommy blogger point is longevity. In blogging terms, I’m a freakin’ dinosaur.
What else?
Hmmm.
I believe my page is cohesive, well-designed, and not terrible to look at.
I believe when I write I have something to say. Whether anyone else thinks so, I don’t know. But that drives my final point home. I write what I want to. There is some self-censorship involved… There are a few choice things I could say about some family members, which I don’t as I don’t want to start WWIII. I don’t write about work much as some things I could say could maybe possibly get me dooced. So – I don’t. Beyond those things – I’m very about what I think. I write it out. It’s my personal journal. I treat it as such. I don’t know why I publish online – I’ve never been able to articulate that at all. But it’s true. I’m true. I believe that working through my issues through my blog is true.
And I’m not going anywhere.
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