Cleaning up 15 years of digital mess

Friends, we’re heading into the last part of 2023, and I started this ol’ blog here on the first day of 2009.

You know what that means? I have FIFTEEN years of blog content that’s mostly gathering digital dust.

Fifteen years is a long time to spill your guts, long-form, on the internet.

When I started blogging in 2009, I was messing around in Blogger (remember Blogger?) and couldn’t tell a category from a tag. I didn’t know what SEO was (if even existed back then?). I didn’t know about featured images, or *good* images, or not stealing graphics from random websites, or how to post photos bigger than a postage stamp.

All I knew was how to post. (And lord knows, I posted twice a day sometimes!)

When I started blogging, I had no idea what I was doing.

I just wanted a blog because I was obsessed with the U.S. (mostly Mormon) mommy blogs.

I was just a little girl (okay, a 25-year-old little girl), sitting around in a very clean condo in Bedford, working 9-5 in Halifax (getting there on Metro Transit), looping the angsty Twilight soundtrack, cooking terrible chicken wraps, and hoping for a baby to keep me company because my husband was working all the time and I wanted a buddy.

(Quite possibly, reading all those Mormon mommy blogs brainwashed me into an obsession with babies and pregnancy. Ah, well.)

Cleaning up my own mess

So when redesigned my author site yesterday, I realized the poor blog needed some work. I moved it from Blogger to WordPress years ago, so some of the links are old ‘LaptopsToLullbies’ links (the original blog name) that forward to the ‘HeathersHandmadeLife’ links, and the category-and-tag situation is pretty dire.

I wish I could reach back in time and give myself a shake, knowing what I know now as someone who works in marketing and uses WordPress daily at my job.

So please bear with me as I try to clean up 15 years of blog mess, so this thing is a bit easier to navigate. (I’m also working with the low-budget version of WordPress here, compared to the very nice version of WordPress I get to use at work, which makes things trickier.)

Along with my parenting newspaper columns and my DIY newspaper columns, there are funny stories here. And sad stories. And milestone-type stories. And weird stories. Stories people might want to read, if they can ever find them.

And I’m making no promises about blogging new content, but you never know. It’s like riding a bike, yadda yadda. Maybe I’ll start blogging more often, especially about my journey to becoming an author.

Except I’m 99% sure I will not talk about pregnancy vitamins, onesies, and cervical mucus ever again? (You’re welcome.)