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With it being the ever-fun, ever-crazy holiday season, I’ve decided to reduce a small bit of the demands on my time by putting this little cluster of websites on hiatus through the holidays.
Please go forth and have a wonderful holiday, regardless of what you celebrate. Take time to be with the people you care about and to reach out to those you can’t be with.
Happy holidays! See you in January!
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 10:29 AM EST
(This topic will end up cross-posted because of how I started blogging.)
The newest blogging challenge from Lorelle on Wordpress asks for our blog’s story. Well, my blogs had a unified start, so it makes sense to start both stories the same, and then follow their development apart individually.
I was gifted with an online journal in January 2002, not long after moving to San Antonio after grad school. She had just met me, and was adamant that I should have this journal (She was doing this to her friends, and she decided the moment she met me that we were going to be friends. In an interesting twist of events, we no longer speak to each other.) At first, I had no idea what I was going to do with the space. I stumbled through a couple of random posts before discovering quizzes. Before long, I started writing random reflections and thoughts about what was going on around me. After a while, it became more a place to tell friends what I was up to. I actually started meeting new people through the community, some of whom I’m still good friends with.
A few months after being given this online journal, I was introduced to Curt Rosengren’s blog. It sparked something in me. I decided I wanted to write more than just silly little “Hello, world” posts. I set up a Blogger blog and started writing in it about personal observations about informal learning (one of my passions). Eventually, I started writing more about education, and then started writing posts about personal development, changing careers, and writing resumes (I was starting to realize I had to consider how I was going to reshape my career path. Still am, come to think of it. I was also spending a lot of time helping friends and family navigate their own career changes.)
After a while, I felt like I had no idea what I was trying to accomplish anymore. The Blogger blog was split up among three TypePad blogs: CareerNiche, DesignNiche, and EducationNiche. They covered the main topics I’d been blogging about at that point. People would occasionally stop by and leave comments, or email me. But TypePad had a series of meltdowns, and I became frustrated at not being able to write when I wanted. This blog dabbled briefly as a Drupal blog (which is where JewelryNiche became a blog, but someone mentioned WordPress, and I checked it out.
I can’t remember when exactly I moved this group of blogs to WordPress. but I remember it was a bit painful. My web guru finally used Multiply to get everything here the way I wanted. (Funny thing, we’re actually finally looking into MU, but I don’t really want to move anything until I have a design and a good idea how everything is going to change around here.) At some point not long after that, I started WritingNiche.
My motivation is purely internal. I need to be able to get things out of my head, and this medium works well for organizing discarded thoughts. Others read and link these blogs, and I’m very appreciative of that fact, and a bit surprised anyone finds this useful. My inspiration comes from life, my own learning efforts, and the blogs I read. The biggest challenge, especially now that I’m trying to reorganize everything, has been figuring out where certain topics fit.
Would I give up any of my Niches? Except for JewelryNiche (which is on an indeterminate hiatus), I don’t think I could reasonably give up any of them. To some degree, they all represent some facet of who I am and what makes me happy. I guess that’s all one could really ask for.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 8:11 AM EDT
I’ve finally accepted that while I love the important aspects of my current job, it’s really not fulfilling my needs. I’ve known this for a while now, but I’m one of those stupidly optimistic people who believes they can change things enough to make them work. Except I am at the boundaries of my job (all of my roles). I have gamed things my way.
When asked what I feel is missing, my answer came without a thought- I have no real opportunities to create. I problem solve on my feet as I work with my students, trying to find the right explanation to help make a concept make sense to them. I created training notes for the two programs I have trained teachers for. I am creating a book that will detail every single process I know.
Beyond that…I’m creating nothing.
While I love teaching and advising, I need to create or I go nuts. I think this, in part, drove some of my jewelry design work (which is nothing more than a series of sketches until I have a better way to visually record and display my pieces). I think it’s also what keeps me working through my writing life (which right now is confined to editing old pieces and polishing them enough to where I feel I could either self-publish them, or don’t feel embarrassed at sharing them on them web.
I am growing. I am changing. I want my web spaces to reflect the directions my life is going. As a result, you may notice that the Niches may be avoided for a while because I am not dealing with that part of my life. You may find Niches absorbed into other Niches as I decide whether it’s a primary or secondary part of my make-up. There’s also a very good chance that a Niche or two might vanish to my personal website as I can no longer make the argument for them being here.
Currently, I’m looking more toward shifting my professional focus, toward freelancing rather than being an entrepreneur until I have a better grasp of who I am. Stay tuned. Feel free to comment on what you are seeing. As always, feel free to continue to make your recommendations and ask questions.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 8:01 AM EST
Well, the website is, at any rate!
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been working on this website for a year. At times, it’s been an in-my-spare-time thing. Right now, I’m in a phase where I’m trying to address anything I can so I can have a good, thorough list of what I can’t do when I next bug my web guru.
This week has seen the addition of blogrolls to most of the blogs! I don’t know why it took me so long to move them over from the old blogs, but I am very happy to say that I finally got the blogrolls up and running, and took the opportunity to purge abandoned or unread blogs from my Bloglines account!
This week, I’m looking toward a more deliberate navigation system and the inclusion of resource links on each Niche blog! I’m also reading up on syndicating the Niche blogs to this page for reading ease. I understand that many visitors are coming for a specific niche, but I know there are others who just like to read my stuff, so I’m trying to make things work well for both groups.
Thank you so much for your support. It keeps this place up and running!
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 7:42 AM EST
That was fairly corny, but accurate.
Late last week, CareerNiche, DesignNiche, and EducationNiche came home. If you follow their links in the sidebar, you will now be taken to their new homes in the website. I’m quite excited about this! All of their feeds aren’t running yet, but i hope to have that fixed very soon.
This is just the beginning. Now that the three wandering blogs are home, there will be some serious behind-the-screens work done that should result in a useful, nice site. Stay tuned for new developments, and let us know how you keep up with the site.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Site News at 7:36 AM EST
So, I’ve been considering some things to allow people to keep up with the site without trying to remember to visit the site every single day/week/month/however frequently they check.
I’ve never been hot on the idea of email mailing lists, because I’m never good about keeping them up and running. I could possibly set up a way for people to sign up to receive updates when the site updates, but that just starts feeling like spam after a while. Another thing I considered as an alternative for a long time was creating a newsletter, a consideration that brings a variety of options with it. I already offer an RSS feed, but I know I have some non-tech saavy people visiting the site.
Thoughts? If you read the site, how would you prefer to get information about the site? Do you use the RSS feed? Would you prefer receiving email updates? If I could throw together a newsletter that highlighted new posts around the site with maybe some bonus material (themed link lists, seasonal thoughts and tips, etc.), would that appeal to you?
Leave me a comment, let me know what you think.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 5:16 PM EST
You may have noticed a few changes on the site today. I certainly have!
I sat down this evening with the intention of playing with the galleries. Somehow or other, playing with the galleries became experimenting to see what was necessary to putting AdSense on the site. Then I decided to play with Feedburner. I still have a brief tweaking to do there so that it’s easy to subscribe to.
But I apparently wasn’t satisfied with just that. I then decided to redecorate the site! I had the theme already. I just needed to change the colors, upload it, and then cross my fingers and hope it would cross all of the subdomains. The good news is that it did, once I figured out that I had to activate the theme at each blog. The bad news is, I looked at the site and realized it looks almost identical to the site when it was Drupal-powered, except it looks less broken. Heh!
I did, however, manage to get the galleries organized somewhat. I still have some pieces to upload, but honestly, after three hours of working on websites the last thing I wanted to do was write copy for some very charming jewelry pieces. If you want to see the current gallery holdings, hop on over to JewelryNiche and click on the gallery link! (The link to JewelryNiche is in the left sidebar. The link to the gallery will be in nearly the same place on JewelryNiche’s home page!)
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 1:57 AM EST
I cannot believe a month has passed already. Time moves far too quickly sometimes.
At any rate, this week, I’m trying to wrestle with some technical issues plaguing the business, the most important one being that there are no images in JewelryNiche’s gallery. This is a bit of a problem. What makes this even more challenging is that the original scans that I did are trapped on a computer that no longer recognizes the internet, so I can’t move them over that way. I have no network cable, so I can’t move them over that way. The scanner has decided to have a mind of its own, so I may or may not be able to make new scans to put them on this computer. Even if I could, my lovely software that lets me clean everything up is on the other computer.
It’s going to be a series of fixes, but I hope to have them fixed by the week’s end so that the gallery will be filled with lovely, simple pieces available for purchase.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 2:12 PM EST
Until I get the design worked out, I’m going to be posting links to other areas of the site in the sidebar under “RTD Divisions”.
Right now it only points to JewelryNiche because that’s the section people expect to see when they visit this site. So if you’re visiting to learn about me as a jewelry designer, you need to follow that link. At the moment, it’s only the blog entries from the old site, but I hope to have a gallery operational before November 1.
That said, it should be noted that this site is about to grow to encompass all of my Niche blogs and their associated belongings. The basic concept is to have an area to express myself in each of these areas, but to keep them accessible so I can more easily demonstrate links between them and, in a way, weave them all together.
It should paint quite the interesting picture, I’m hoping.
It also needs to be noted that now that the hiccup is fixed, I do rather love WordPress! It lets me blog in an experience that faintly resembles TypePad, where much of this site is coming from. Give me another couple of months, but I suspect I’ll have much kinder things to say about WordPress than I did about Drupal.
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 4:57 PM EDT
It turns out that Apricot Lane extended their fundraiser, so if you want to support a great cause (and have an opportunity to win a piece of my jewelry) and are anywhere near Redmond Town Center, head on over and check it out!
Every little bit helps!
Posted by Rebecca as Site News at 2:31 PM EDT