Blog Birthdate: December 2005

I started this blog in December of 2005 with an article about feminism vs. patriarchy. The post was geared towards women entrenched in fundamental Christianity – of which I was emerging from. At the time, I was married to my high school sweetheart and we were growing a moderate size family; our fourth baby was then about 18 months old.

Fast-forward to November 2018

So much as changed. I’m divorced. That fourth baby is now 14. I live with my first high school crush. I’ve all but renounced religion.

From time to time I’ll peruse back through old blog posts, enjoy the photos of the children sprinkled throughout, and chuckle at the stories that go with many of those photos. Usually though, I’ll grimace at the mess that an unstructured, neglected, and outdated blog produces. There are many posts that I can’t even relate to anymore. I read them and think, “Who was that girl?”

But there are over 800 posts to filter through. I’ve already deleted 200 of them. At one time there were nearly 1100 blog posts on this site. The posts aren’t politically correct, no where near SEO compliant, and probably only interesting to myself.

Jumping into 2020

New Family Structure, New Life All Together

It will soon be the year 2020. That marks 9 years since my separate and divorce from Royce. My first year as Mrs. John Phillips, since marrying the love of my life, John. The first year that three of my four children are legal adults. And my first year – since 2000 when I only had one toddler underfoot – that I only have one (adult) child left to raise. The first year I’ll spend NOT raising my fourth child, who left home last June to live with her Aunt. And the first year that I start really thinking about what I want to be doing, and where I want to be living, by 2025.

There are a lot of “Firsts” coming up in 2020.

It’s time to pivot this blog; remove the old, build out the new.

Fifteen Years of Content

Fifteen years of content equates to a lot of legacy content hanging around on the net, attributed to me. Or really – attributed to who I was in my life’s journey on the dates of the blog posts.

I’ve been working on a content plan for 2020 thanks to Bridget’s Content Planner Workbook. Half of the planning is for the Codebrain Media Blog. (Also another first – first year we will be blogging for business) and the other half is for my personal blog. I need to start journal-blogging again. I want to start writing about the journey that is the end stages of parenting children and the beginning season of parenting young adults. I want to write about the issue of parental alienation and how that has impacted everyone in my family. I want to write about what a good, healthy, unconditional love relationship looks like.

I want to think on and write about matters that are important and relevant to who I am today and where I am in my personal life story.

Have you ever had to do a full #contentcleanup on your #WordPress #blog? How did you wrangle it? Any #protips to share? #contentarchitecture #digiblogchat

How do I clean up this blog?

Or…do I even bother? Do I just set a plan for future posts and start moving forward?

Yesterday I decided to give the blog a face lift.

I changed the colors and organized some widgets. Huge overhaul. Ha!

I also moved ALL my posts from published to draft. I deleted all my old categories. I added in six categories that may evolve/disappear as I keep fine tuning things on this site.

I have set aside two hours per day to work on any aspect of this blog.

As I rewrite posts, or at the very least simply update them from the WordPress Classic Editor to Gutenberg, I’ll categorize them and publish. They’ll automagically be filtered into the menu-category tabs. That’s about as complex as I want to get with this site.

Some posts may never be moved out of the draft status, but I expect that many will resurface. There are still over 800 posts on this site to filter through.

Eventually everything will be ok.

My blog has been dormant for a long time. It’s going to take a while to get things cleaned up, tightened up, and moving forward again. But, that just leaves 2020 with another new first – first time I’ll be consistently blogging since around 2008!