Welcome to my new blog

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to my new blog.

If you came here redirected from my previous blogs Stumble Down Under or Magickly, you’ll find much of that content here and more is coming. If you’re joining me for the first time, welcome!

You might be wondering what on earth I’m doing now. Let me explain.

I started blogging around 2003 in the AOL Journals community. I don’t remember the name of my journal or what I wrote about. It was probably just a daily journal. I do remember that I sometimes participated in the Weekend Assignment and Monday Photo Shoot, two series that AOL’s professional blogger John Scalzi created. When AOL introduced ads to the AOL Journals, I left. I didn’t want ads on my journal. If I was forced to have them, I at least wanted some control over the ads that were being shown on my journal.

I went to Blogger. At one point, my blog was called from Jupiter, but I think I changed the name several times. By this time, I’d begun to write more about Paganism. I never took to Blogger’s dashboard, however. At some point, I decided to try WordPress.

The rest is foggy. In January 2011, I launched a blog on WordPress called Second Mode about the virtual world Second Life. In 2012, I launched Stumble Down Under, which was about my expat journey from the US to Australia. At some point, I migrated my Blogger content to another WordPress blog, Magickly. For a brief time, I had a blog dedicated to tarot and another about birdwatching.

Blogging had grown up. Instead of a rambling online diary, your blog could be about a specific topic such as fashion, photography, motherhood, or blogging. In fact, best practice says your blog should be about something. Some thing. Not twenty things. Optimise your blog for that topic and it will rank better in Google. Use social media to target people interested in your topic. So, I compartmentalised, and I had a blog about this and a blog about that. I have a lot of interests. I get excited. I want to tell you about All The Things.

No more.

Some time ago I bought a domain with my name. I don’t remember why. I’m sure I had grand plans, but I never did anything with it. It’s come in handy now. Once your blog is your name, there’s nowhere else to go.

So, what’s this one about. It’s about what it always was: magic, books, feminism, technology, expat living, and everything else. But it’s a little tighter now, a little more focused and organised, and all in one place.

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