Keeping the Tradition #atozchallenge

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The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging in the Present

Whether you blog several times a day, several times a month, or several times a year, you're keeping the great tradition of blogging alive. Whether your blog is for music or politics or memoir or poetry or cat pictures or anything else, you're participating in a vital function of the Internet: bringing people together. Blogging has been around since the foundation of the Internet, but even before that, there were LISTSERV mailing lists, bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms and many other ways of communication across the Internet. Even as those earlier forms of communication became Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, which further morphed into Instagram and TikTok and WhatsApp, blogging remains.

Why? Because blogging fills a need that neither the old forms nor the newer forms of electronic communication accomplish: It presents the blogger as an individual. Your blog is your living room. When people come to your blog, they're coming to see you specifically. Can Facebook say the same?

There will always be a need for a place where people to fully express themselves, and in the face of occasionaly-draconian Terms of Service at social media sites limiting what you can say, your blog is your own platform where you can get away with saying about anything you want. Terms of Service on blogging platforms are far more liberal, giving you more of a free rein over what you say and how you say it.

So, let's continue this tradition and express ourselves freely, while we still can.

Do you feel that you can say anything you want on your blog?

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John's Choice For "A Blog With 2020 Vision" #atozchallenge

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

***A Blog with 2020 Vision***

Janet Miles is my pick for "a blog with 2020 vision." Janet's blog is Janet's Smiles. I first got to know Janet when she asked about how to "simulcast" her blog on Wordpress. I had written a post on how to do this from Wordpress to Blogger, and she wanted to know if it worked the other way. I think my answer was "it should," and she managed to set it up with little or no help from me. You can find her Wordpress "simulcast" here. We've been "blog buddies" ever since.

Janet is a scrapbooker, and she and her husband and/or daughters attend a lot of concerts in the Bay Area. She takes lots of photographs and keeps track of the set lists. She then turns these memories into scrapbook pages, and does beautiful work. This year, she's sharing the scrapbook pages she's created. They're truly works of art, and she writes a "mini-review" of each show. It's almost as good as being there yourself.

By all means, stop by Janet's blog(s) to admire her work and to say "Hi!"

Who would you choose, just based on what you've seen so far?

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In the moment (#AtoZChallenge)

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging in the Present

Are you a pre-writer or a pantser? I pre-wrote all my posts over the course of February. I usually do this because my posts require a lot of research (including library trips), and I like to be free to visit others in April. But it also has a downside: Things can change a lot in a few weeks.
Interest changes. Every year I think I know what I want to blog about for the next Challenge. And then I change the idea multiple times. You might do the same. Having multiple interests is a good thing!
Inspiration changes. You might think your theme is up to date when you start, and then things turn around, and you might be inspired to blog, talk, muse about something else entirely. Allow yourself flexibility in the Challenge, and in your blogging!
Intensity changes. When you start a demanding challenge like A to Z, there are days when you just don't feel like doing anything at all. Sometimes you get excited, and sometimes you just cruise along. Both are okay!
In the moment, a lot of things can happen that Influence your blogging. I am writing this post two weeks in advance, and I can't even tell what things are going to look like both online and off by the time if goes live. But that's okay! Even if you plan ahead, you can always go back in an edit. Things change. Things get interesting. Inspiration strikes. Go with it!

Did your interests or inspiration change since you started the Challenge this year? 

Tell us what inspires you!

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