Blog Exercises: What Are You Missing?

Frogs redefine my thoughts about amphibians annually.

As a child, spring was for tadpoles and summers were for frogs in the swamps, ponds, and ditches around my country ranch in the Pacific Northwest. Moving to Oregon’s Coastal Mountain range west of Portland, my winters are spent driving up the foothills like a crazy person, avoiding patches of ice and hopping frogs as they propel themselves across the road in the evening and through the night.

This year no frogs. I haven’t swerved my car once this winter for frogs crossing the road, only the rare bit of suspect black ice. Is it because it hasn’t been cold enough long enough, or just not cold and wet enough? I don’t know.

Red-legged frog in the Olympic National Park, photography by Brent VanFossen.

Yesterday, I did a quick swerve around a small tree frog on the road. That’s when I realized it was the first frog of the year. It’s May, late Spring and early Summer here. Where are the frogs of January and February? Were they crossing the road when I wasn’t on it, or has the extreme dry weather this winter changed their habitat and habits?

Thinking about this single frog and all the frogs I missed this year, I thought about what I was missing on my blog or from my blog. Such thoughts are dominoes in my mind. What is gone that once was a regular part of my life blogging? Is the loss a good thing or bad?

When I started blogging long before blogging was a word, even before online journaling, it was hard work to get content up on the web. By 2003 and WordPress, it became easier and faster, and I became more productive. As WordPress improved, leaping forward after 2006 with WordPress.com, I was really rocking. It became so easy to publish, I forgot about how hard it used to be.

When things get easier, sometimes we take it for granted. Such productivity is one thing I was missing as work and life got in the way of multiple posts a day. This year is my year to increase my writing and publishing productivity with these Blog Exercises.

So what else is missing?

WordPress. I miss blogging about WordPress all the time. I love WordPress. I find all the bits and pieces, the breadth and width of all things WordPress fascinating. Ten years later, I’m still not bored with WordPress. Clearly, I need more WordPress in my life as well as my blog. Time to put WordPress back on my things to do list. With the 10th Anniversary of WordPress the end of May at hand, seems like I have some motivation to focus back on WordPress.

I miss blogging about the news of WordPress, blogging, and web publishing. I used to be one of the few sources on the web with a huge round-up of all the news that was news, and even some desperate attempts to be newsworthy, on WordPress, blogging, social media, and web publishing. It consumed 4-8 hours a day and paid less than pennies. I don’t think I could keep up with it now as it is a huge time commitment and there are others doing excellent work reporting on it all now, but I miss it.

I miss blogging about other bloggers. I love learning about how others blog, the stories behind their blogs and why they do the things they do. I should put that back on my list.

What else is missing from my blogging life?

What is missing from your blogging life?

This blog exercise answers that question.

If you used to blog something or have something on your blog that you are now missing, are you missing it? Do you notice its absence? Is it time to revisit it and consider bringing it back?

Look deeper. Is there something you used to blog about that you don’t any more? Do you have categories that don’t represent your topics any more? Consider how to edit the content, move the posts to new categories, or change the categories so they more accurately represent now and the future rather than things you don’t do any more. I need to remove some categories and shift some posts around from the things I used to do that I don’t do now. More for my to do list.

If you do find something missing you with to revive, how are you going to do it better or different now? We all learn from our past efforts, improving all the time, so how will this time be different?

If you choose to blog about this topic, encouraging your readers to consider what is missing from their lives and web publishing and social sharing experiences, remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

SPOILER: By the end of June, I will be publishing the first six months of Blog Exercises as an ebook, the first half of what will become the final book at the end of the year. Stay tuned for news!

---

Subscribe Via Feedburner Subscribe by Email

Copyright Lorelle VanFossen.