The beginning was in html
I began my life/career on the Internet with an HTML-created website for our garden center, Treasures Planted. I had to hand-code all of it and it took ages, but I enjoyed the work of it. After many naptimes and baby-bedtimes of work, I had created a multiple-page website/catalog where customers could purchase bare-rooted plants, dried herbs, and herbal things I made such as sachets and potpourri, and bath salts—that stuff.
We – website owners including me – noticed that if we updated the website frequently, it encouraged people to visit our site more often. This form of updating was later called “web logging,” then “blogging.”
then we formed communities
Several years later, our family had grown and a couple of our children were school-age, so I changed interests from making products to writing. The topics I wrote about were mostly homeschooling and family. First, I joined HomeschoolBlogger where dozens of other homeschoolers gathered to create our own ‘blogs’ (now called that) on their collective website. It was a fun atmosphere, and I still miss it. I made a friend I still have to this day, though we’ve never met in person.
next, we went independent again, but with design templates
I can’t remember why we didn’t stay in the communities, but everyone started leaving. For my part, I have always liked to own my work, and it made me uncomfortable to have it on the platform of someone else (this is the reason I don’t put a lot of effort into social media).
I went to Typepad for years, then moved my sites to self-hosted WordPress, and have kept them there ever since.
Content lost, but also kept
I have every letter written by my then-boyfriend, then-fiance, and now-husband Tim. They’re decades old, but still precious to me. So you can bet I saved every blog post I wrote. But the images, though also saved separately, were hosted in different locations so now my old posts are a mess. Thankfully, in my hoarding habit, I also downloaded all of my blog posts (including their photos) into a 2,000+ page “blog book.” It’s just a hefty pdf file – maybe someday I’ll print it out for Mom.
deciding to republish some of the old posts
I’m in a new chapter of life, with our children grown and with the busyness of prepping for our upcoming move to mountain acreage. I’m working on a new site for our little forest farm, and I’m phasing out of Freely Educate (I think – it’s hard to let go of). I don’t want to look for “high-quality educational finds” anymore – I want to look for wildflowers and acorns.
I thought to keep the door to the past closed and keep the posts of Keeping the Home and Just Pure Lovely (my former blog names) off the internet. But as I went through the blog book, I came up with lessons understood, truths realized, memories reminded, and skills learned. And I thought it was such a shame to not have this content floating around on the Internet for whomever may need to read it or see it.
All this to say, I’m republishing old posts here on this site as I go through the blog book. They’re precious memories, but I’m not reposting the ones that are just nostalgic. Those can be printed out for the kids or for Mom. I’m republishing the ones I think may be helpful to someone who stumbles upon them. You’ll find them under All/Journal. If they’re also relevant to this site’s current categories, they’ll also be stored within the categories.
Please write, speak, photograph, or create, too. We need to do so, for each other’s sake.
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