I started blogging in 2011, although I don’t think my earliest posts are still around. The first place I blogged was on ‘blogspot’, not sure that is even still around. I blogged regularly for a couple years, and then less regularly but still a few times in a month for a couple years, and then just got, busy, lazy, overwhelmed, all of thee above?
Yesterday I got an email from Bluehost, a web hosting company, notifying me they renewed my website, which automatically happens every June. I get the auto-renew email every year but just dismiss it. I knew each of the last few years that I wasn’t writing much, if at all, but like my favorite size 6 pants I would tell myself I have to keep it/them around in case I want to write again, or in the case of the pants, find a magic lamp with a genie inside that can make me a size 6 again.
I opened the email yesterday rather than ignoring it, and saw the amount charged to my account. It was triple what I paid originally for a year. Crap, when did that happen and how many years was I paying what some would consider a car payment to host my dusty blog? I logged into my Bluehost account and was embarrassed that I had paid a small fortune for the last 3 years, and the 3 years prior were also double what I had originally paid. Apparently the original rate I paid was a promotional rate good only for the first year.
This is getting wordy and I haven’t even gotten to the main subject. I’ll wrap up this boring bit up and skip to me becoming extremely frustrated with a employee at a call center likely not located in the USA, and then asking my tech savvy super husband to back up my content and find me a new host and basically update my blog. So this is where we, I, you – the reader and me – the author are now. It is a template blog page on wordpress but it has all my original content and I’ll make it my own soon.
One of the things I started with this morning was tidying up the “Better Blogs” page. I really didn’t think much of my writing or my voice 7 years ago when I titled a page that shared other blogs “Better Blogs”. Of course quite a few of the blogs listed on that page have been around much longer than me, have regularly updated material, and many of those authors have also written books, work in the diabetes field, and are speakers at conferences. I will likely change the name of the page soon to something less self deprecating. I clicked on every link on the page. Sadly I had to remove 37 links, most because the pages no longer exist, but a few because there hadn’t been new content added since 2016 or earlier. A large number of them haven’t had new content shared since 2017, but I didn’t delete them since I’ve barely shared any content in the last two years.
When I started blogging it seemed like a 4 new diabetes blogs, as well as other chronic disease blogs, would pop up each week, not to mention all the random mom, food, organization, and exercise blogs that came on the scene in those first years that I was blogging.
Are there really so few diabetes bloggers still writing, or am I just really out of the loop?
One of the first blogs written by a person with diabetes that I read regularly before I got involved with the diabetes online community has recently ceased publishing new material. The author is still active in the community, and her posts are still available on her site, but no new material will be added. I am so happy for my friend, and all the ways her life has expanded and changed, but I’ll miss reading her musings on her specific page.
What are you reading lately? Where do you go for stories or diabetes tech reviews or advice about navigating all the ‘ins and outs’ of raising kids with diabetes or the ‘me too’ moments related to diabetes or chronic diseases?
I miss writing and I miss sharing stories. I also miss reading others stories. I’m hoping for a new wave of writers or a wave of renewed writers and I’m hoping I can find my voice again.
What do you want to read about?
