My Elderly, Old School Blog — It’s Still Going Strong

If you have been posting comments on my website lately and are wondering why I’m not making them public — blame my elderly, old school blog. It needs an update.

This website, this blog, goes back to February, 2009, when I put up my very first posts, including “How Selective Service Made a Man of My Son — Without Even Trying.”

In 2009, I was thinking back on the year my son turned 18 — draft age — when one of my big worries was that war could break out, the draft rules could shift, and Peter could be sent into battle.

My Elderly, Old School Blog

The year 2009 was also a year when blogs had become a popular way to reach a mainstream audience. I was in the process of shopping my book, “Wrestling with God,” to agents and publishers, and an active blog was one way to demonstrate that my book could pull in readers.

So I started blogging — once a week and sometimes more than once a week — and I have not been able to stop since.

Sixteen years later, this website is home to 827 blog posts. I’m not kidding. I’ve written and posted 827 essays on this site over the years, 828 counting this one, with monthly visitors averaging a respectable, though modest, 1,500.

Blogging takes time — one full day to write, illustrate and key in a post.

Losing a Husband, but Keeping a Blog

So in 202o, I thought I might cut back on blogging and turn my attention to the books I was trying to write, the more literary writing I wanted to do.

Then, when my husband died in February, 2021, blogging became a way of observing and recording that loss. Cheryl, my trusty social media guru, noticed what I was doing and encouraged me to keep on writing about Jon. And I have.

Meanwhile, I was getting older fast. And my elderly, old school blog was getting older even faster.

And all around me, all across cyberspace, the with-it bloggers and their readers were moving on to platforms like Instagram, TikTok and  Substack.

A Blog That’s Still Going Strong

But here I was — here I am — slogging away at my elderly blog, meeting my weekly deadline out of a habit born of  years and years of meeting  magazine and newspaper deadlines.

The trouble is, this website, because it is so darned old, was built on a platform that is antiquated and no longer supports the filters needed to keep the spam bots at bay. Thus, every day, another batch of spam floods my comments inbox, crowding out comments that might be coming from real folks like you.

But all is well. This website is being rebuilt. Things will get tidied up. The spam bots will go down in defeat. And I will keep on posting. I can’t help myself.

More about the challenges of the writing life at “Is My Writing Too Nice?”  Also, “‘The Lifespan of a Fact.’ Now Playing in Berkeley.”