Jottings, Journeys, Joy - A Big Footprint

I run hot and cold with my personal blog jillballau: Jottings, Journeys, Joy. 

This morning I had to enlist the help of that blog's archive on Trove to find out when I had actually written my first post. Over the years, I have added some predated posts to the blog and integrated the posts from another earlier Men at Work blog into it.

After a a bit of digging I found my first post was on 4th July 2012. Here is what I said:

Do I really need another Blog? Am I suffering from Blogarrhoea?

I don't need another blog but ...........my active blogs Geniaus and Android Genealogy are targetted towards my friends in genealogy. Sometimes I'd like to post about my travels, the books I've read, the things that bug me and the performances I've seen. Sometimes I'd just like to share a photo that doesn't fit in with the theme of my Men at Work blog. I don't want to clog up my genimates blog feeds with off topic posts that could be regarded as spam.  

When I am travelling I publish a few photos and updates to Facebook and when something tickles my fancy I write about it there too. Aggregating these Facebook items in one stream is not easy.

Recently I have been following and enjoying Jackie van Bergen's new blog, Jax Trax. As a genealogist I see the value of leaving a personal blog like Jackie's as a resource for future generations. Jackie's blog has been the catalyst for my decision to pollute the blogisphere with yet another blog.

Look out blogisphere here comes jillballau.

The current Covid lockdown has given me time to evaluate  jillballau which is not very popular in the blogisphere. Firstly I thought about my purpose, I have realised that, while the visits and comments from friends and strangers may massage my ego, my purpose was stated succinctly in that first post where I said "I see the value of leaving a personal blog like Jackie's as a resource for future generations".

I have recommitted to that purpose. It is important to me that I leave a big footprint behind for the generations of the future. I am honoured that jillballau is preserved in The Australian Web Archive on Trove so I know what I post will be preserved. 

Back in June I wrote a post Unloved in which I promised to give my neglected blog some attention. I have been plugging away over the past few weeks giving it some much needed attention.

Among the things I have done is modify the static pages on the blog by adding pages for my travel map and books read which had previously been in widgets in the sidebar. I have renamed all the sexist "Men at Work" tags to "Workers". I have changed and added many other tags and selected some popular tags, that reflect the main themes of the blog, for a Topics widget on the home page. I have gone back through my 4 Terabytes of photos and found many of the folders of resized photos previously shared on FaceBook which I am cheekily sharing in predated posts to preserve the chronological nature of the blog. 

The blog is rich in images with many posts having 20+ images and few words, my pictures tell many stories. I have tried various tweaks to get the posts to load faster without success. Hopefully with better internet speeds in the future this will be fixed.

I apologise to the ancestors and DNA matches who I have been ignoring but, as my biological clock is ticking away, I am taking some time to focus on my story. Reliving my jottings and journeys has given me much joy during this lockdown.