Blog History in Four Year Increments

Eleven years ago I started a garden blog on January 31, 2010. For four years I documented gardens I was creating in Connecticut and I found a community of like bloggers and even met some of them. It was very social, with lots of conversations in the comments, and group memes we all participated in. I followed dozens and dozens of garden bloggers from all over the world. It was a great experience, but after several years it got to be too much; it was like work to keep the social connections and memes going and it was annoying to always be thinking of what I could post every time I went out in my garden or visited one.

My first blog: My Weeds Are Very Sorry

In 2014 I closed that blog and just kept my journal going, a blog diary I had also been writing. I stopped the social connections and only documented what interested me or what I needed to keep track of, not what followers might want to read. It was still a public blog, but I did not cultivate readers and I stopped participating in all the online conversations. I no longer promoted a long list of "other blogs I like to read" in a sidebar. 

Keeping a personal log of what I was doing for my own reference, with pictures, was all I wanted.

My journal: Laurrie's Garden Diary

At the beginning of 2017 I closed that blog and started one about moving to New Mexico, mostly to update family and a few friends on our transition. It's about the move and new discoveries, but of course lots of garden stuff crept in as I found myself in a new climate.

It seems each of my blogs has a shelf life of about four years. And here I am now, at four years with this latest one. It's no longer about our move to Santa Fe. We've been here three and a half years now. 

This journal: Enchanted

I want to keep journaling, but this blog is no longer about our move. 

For 2021 I revamped the look and colors and fonts on this blog, so there's that -- a cosmetic refresh, but it needs a new direction.

It seems, though, that personal blog journals are not a thing any more. Instead, the format is to put pictures, videos, or podcasts on instagram or some other media, and do a microblog -- two sentences about the picture plus a dozen clever hashtags.  

I went back and opened up the old-style garden blogs I had so carefully followed from 2010 to 2014 and almost none are still posting anything regularly. Or at all. No one is journaling. If they are doing any garden writing, it's on instagram with occasional links back to a website for a longer article about a project undertaken.

For me the reward of blogging is the craft of writing an interesting entry week after week, keeping a running rhythm of observations and seasons and quotidian events. A picture with hashtags, likes, and a sentence or two isn't what I want to do. 

So, I'll keep updating this journal, old style and outdated as the format is. I'm not sure what I'll blog about. What will the next four years bring?