First of all I would like to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to read my posts. Thank you for leaving comments, thank you for your support and thank you for your friendship.
As part of honouring this anniversary, I spent some time yesterday making an addition to the blog. A new section of Featured Writings has been created and it is located in the right hand sidebar. When you click on a category, such as getting into galleries, a page will open up that contains posts that were written over the past year pertaining to that topic. I appreciate the fact that there are so many interesting and diverse blogs for me to read. From them I get inspiration. So credit goes out to Marsha Robinett. I saw her featured articles many months ago and since then it has been on my to do list. Credit also goes to Casey Klahn who had instructions on his blog. His advice on going back into my old posts and creating a single label so they could be gathered up was invaluable. And also, I must mention Rose Welty. From Rose's blog, I was able to click on her 'buttons' and see how to write the code for the hyperlinks.
Another change is that I have created a new blog roll which now appears with all the bells and whistles. It too can be found in the right hand sidebar.
A review of my year as a blogger:
- Biggest surprise My biggest surprise was how much time blogging would take. My husband and I had just moved, I was setting up my new studio and I had a rather ambitious teaching schedule. I am not sure I would have started blogging right then if I had known the amount of time I would spend, not just on creating my own blog but on reading and commenting on the blogs of others. I quickly realized that getting known so that people would visit your site took an investment of time.
- Biggest challenge Just a couple of months after creating the blog we discovered that my Dad was dealing with some sort of health issue. I had just started to develop a readership and so I tried to keep the blog going even though I was now out of town a lot. Finally in the summer, I gave up. I was away more than I was home and given the situation, blogging just wasn't important. I am very grateful to the readers who started reading again once I returned.
- Greatest reward By far, the greatest reward has been the other bloggers I have met during this process of blogging. Wonderful friendships with people around the world have been created and I value you very much.
- Favourite blog post In order to put together the featured writings, I have spent a fair bit of time looking at the posts from the past year. You can reread my favourite post by clicking here. It isn't about art but the post has a picture of my Dad taken just two weeks before he died and in the post I have my thoughts on how to live life, a bit of a tribute to the the incredible man he was.
Thanks again to everyone, whether you are a follower or an occasional reader. I hope you continue to enjoy this blog. I welcome your feedback, I appreciate your comments and if you have been 'lurking', why not say hello? I would love to meet you. You can always drop me an email if you are not signed up to leave comments via blogger.
On to year two!
