Day 1 on Day 3: My blog experience

I first started blogging in 2006. In some ways it was an educational experience, where I was blogging about my trials and tribulations on building a sea kayak. From this, I turned my blog into a general purpose weblog, which is a bit of a no-no. However, I use my blog to communicate with friends and family that don’t live in Vancouver and it gives them a way to check up on me and see what’s new in our little world. I’ll go semi-long periods without posting (like this fall) because I get busy, but that’s the way it goes. Most of my hits are based on product reviews that I do of things I like (electronics, bikes).

Last year I started another blog, this one based on education. It follows my educational career, both as a teacher and student. I have in my mind that it might get leveraged into my ETEC 590 e-portfolio. Only time will tell.

I’ve also used a few other blogs but stopped them because I didn’t have time. I had a photoblog which was fun, along with a tumblr micro-blog. I found that Twitter replaced Tumblr, although Tumblr is great for posting neat findings from the net.

I now have a class blog that is linked to a class website. The blog expands upon some of things we cover in class and shows off some student works. I keep the blog seperate from the class website, which operates more as a CMS.

In terms of blogging platforms, I’ve tried a few. My personal blog is on my own hosted WordPress site. My education blog is Joomla, hosted on my domain. The current class blog is done in Blogger, which I chose to use to experiment with integration with Google sites. Photoblogging was done in wordpress, tumblr, and another platform that I can’t remember right now – there are a couple of options out there. Joomla and Drupal are really blog platforms, they are full-on content management systems. In my experience, they need a lot of work in order to work as a good blogging platform. Unless you have a lot of time and want to drill into something with a lot of power, I would suggest avoiding them.

Twitter has also taken away from some of my blogging. It’s just so much easier to send out a 140 character update as opposed to find the time to sit down and write a post. But Twitter has also opened up a whole new universe for me in terms of developing a PLN and following other educators’ blogs. Perhaps there is a link between this behaviour and what David is doing with Gleanr.

Posted in: Week 07: Blogs