Me(me) Blog Tag: Give me the blogging life

I’ve been tagged for this meme by Hal Manogue (Living an Ordinary Life in a Non-Ordinary Way) and Dani Greer.

I’m tagging Janet Muirhead Hill, author and publisher and Velda Brotherton, author and video star, Susan J. Tweit, and Alethea Eason, brilliant children’s author of the new book “Hungry.”Here are my answers to this blog tag about the blogging life…..JGR

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1. How long have you been blogging?

My first blog post was August 10, 2006…a year and a quarter ago. The post was titled, “We Get What We Bring: Be a Guest at the Feast” and began….”We get what we bring.This principle is brilliantly illustrated in the responses to Daughters of the Dust in its Amazon reviews. Julie Dash’s brilliant and ground-breaking independent film is too good to dismiss.” It’s posted under my “Reel Life” category (you can browse archives on the sidebar by category) if you’d like to read the rest of the review.

2. What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?

My blog is the face page for my website. We moved the old website “Sightlinesbook.com” over to “Riehlife.com” and put the “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” materials (poems, photos, talks, and other background material) on the sidebar. I wanted to go beyond my debut poetry collection. I wanted the site to be more dynamic. I wanted to be able to update it myself.

I began my blog a year ago August as part of an on-line promotion for “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary.” It was becoming the “done thing” to have a blog and it looked like fun. I don’t really have blog mentors…over the course of the 16 months I’ve written the blog I’ve developed my own tone and refined my initial pupose.

3. Are you trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?

I’ve never had a talent for money. My mission is “creating connections through the arts and across cultures and generations” as a daily affair on my blog. As a tool for connection, in every sense, it’s been enormously successful.

4. What 3 things do you struggle with online?

The new robo-splog-porno-bot blogs really get my goat. Don’t understand what they’re out there to do, and it bugs me that they are using my content from ezine articles and my blog and creating a link to me that I cannot break. I have good comment spam control, but this is beyond what anyone seems to know about.

We’ve recently done a technical update for WordPress and one of the best features–being able to queue up future posts–has been lost in the process. Also, posts that were queued up were lost. Hours of work. Some I’ve been able to re-create and some I’ve just had to kiss off.

Perhaps with some careful neglect time will pass and someone will find answers to these annoyances.

5. What 3 things do you love about being online?

I love connecting ideas. I love connecting people. I love connecting things that weren’t previously connected.

I’ve become part of a community of bloggers and readers. I’ve explored and deepened my mission of “creating connections through the arts, across cultures and generations.”

Riehl Life: village wisdom for the 21st century has been a wonderful place to feature my 92- year-old father, his creative work, and his vigorous aging under the “Daddy ‘n Me” category, if you want to check the archives.

Just last month I finally found out how to view my blog statistics, and that’s been fun. In the past 12 months, Riehlife has had 350,000 hits and 68,000 visits. We’ve gone from an average of 50 visits per day to 350 visits per day. On these cool charts they have, you can see the traffic rising each month. It’s satisfying to know I’m providing good content and in some cases, inspiration, for my readers. I’ve created a community of readers that have become part of my life…part of Riehlife…all of us living Real Lives.