Tag: blogging

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Happy Birthday Postcards From TLC!

We made it! We have reached the 1-year anniversary of Postcards From TLC. What was once only a thought/dream/idea became reality when our first post was published on May 12, 2018.

I had been thinking for a while that I would love to get into blogging. It would be a fun project to work on in my spare time. Who knew that it would be much more time-consuming than my “spare time”? I’d estimate that most weeks, I put in close to what I work at my day job, around 35 hours. Granted, some weeks are less, and I can control that, but I always keep my goal of 3 posts per week in mind. (Although, due to some technical difficulties, I didn’t always hit that goal this year.)

I owe a ton of thanks to my financial advisor, Eric Niswonger. In one of our yearly meetings, chit-chatting over lunch, I had mentioned that I would love to set up a blog but had no idea how to do it. He gave me a few suggestions and the motivation to give it a shot and so far I’ve made it a whole year. He not only steered me in the right blogging direction, but he also takes really good care of my investments! If you want help with your investments, comment below and I’ll get you his contact info.

I’ve had an incredible time learning the technical stuff about how to set up a website, how to promote my blog, and well, the content is really the easiest, fun part. As someone who has always loved to write (even if it’s just a list) and majored in English, the writing is the fun part. Now, whether anyone else actually reads it or enjoys it–who knows? The point is, a blog can be totally self-serving. I can write posts and even if no one else reads them, I have an ongoing documentation of things I’ve done and places I’ve been. I just hope, that along the way, someone can glean one helpful tidbit, or moment of entertainment from it.

Going forward, I’m excited to see what year 2 brings! I’m hoping to continue cranking out my posts each week, tweaking the site a little bit more, and learning additional skills that will help me in my blogging future. I’m also looking forward to acquiring more, new content, which means hitting the road. Cheers to Postcards and I hope you continue following!

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A High-Five To Myself

I have to high-five myself at this point. When I started this blogging gig, I knew there would be some “techy” things I would need to learn about. I don’t consider myself very “techy”, but apparently, I can Google instructions and follow them in order to make things work which has saved my butt on this blog.

As time has gone on, I’ve surprised myself along the way. Learning throughout this past year about graphics, widgets, headers, footers, HTML code,affiliate marketing, SEO, crawling bots, and so on was really beyond my reach. Or so I thought. BUT, I got most of it figured out and set up the way I wanted it on my blog. AND I can even carry on an intelligent conversation with my colleagues about, say, SEO and what it is.

Fast forward my learning to February, 2018. This is when I realized the way I had my blog set up was limiting. I couldn’t do certain things I wanted to do, I couldn’t use the theme that I really preferred (how the blog looks to you), and soon, I would have more traffic than it was set up to handle. stop-1013732_1280From what I could tell, I would need to move to a self-hosted platform.

And guess what? I did it!  You may have noticed recently, that my webpage looks different. Not drastically different, I still have the same logo and same pics used in my header. The coloring is still the same so I think it still has the same feel. But, I now have a side bar menu instead of dropdown at the top, a different layout and blah, blah, blah. Not to bore you with the details, let’s just say that I’ve re-vamped this blog literally from top to bottom and had to learn so much in order to do so. presentation-1454403_1280Thank you for your patience as I’ve transitioned over to the self-hosted platform. I’m still waiting for my domain name to be released, so you will see something besides “box5501.temp.domains…” in your address bar when on my blog.  Once the domain privacy on my previous platform releases my domain name, tlcpostcards.com, everything on my blog will be fully functional again and I will be able to proceed as usual and hopefully probably learn some more “techy” things. I hope this results in you have a better experience with my postings. Thank you for following!