A brief history of my blogging

The ever-wonderful Jim Groom (you’ll notice I’ve linked to his blog) and the folks at Reclaim Hosting are engaged in a series of deep-diving video conversations about writing and blogging called “On Writing”. You can view the sessions on YouTube. The Reclaim crew has talked with Kate Bowles, Alan Levine, Martin Weller, Bonnie Stewart, and many more people I’ve worked with either directly or tangentially over the years.

It’s all about writing and blogging. I do both, so folks may well wonder: what is my story with blogging?

The Beginning

I began by blogging about history (because I’m a historian), but I couldn’t say exactly when (because I’m not a very good historian when it comes to my own life). The first post I have a record of was dated 2006, even though I’d been teaching online and a citizen of the internet since 1998. That first blog was hosted in a Lunarpages account, using a program (they weren’t called apps then) called Nucleus.

When I got deeply involved in educational technology and educational philosophy (c. 2008), I created a new blog in WordPress instead of just posting on my Nucleus blog. That seemed like a huge decision, and in retrospect it was. It meant bifurcating my online identity into “historian” and “educator”. Two identities, two blogs.

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs

Over time, I began to focus more and more on college teaching and ed tech, so my WordPress blog got far more attention than my history blog. And other blogs were set up. Some were for courses in which I participated, like CCK08, EC&I in 2010, and DS106 in 2011. Some were for me to use with my students as I fought the Learning Management Systems trying to control my pedagogy. I created a Tumblr and joined Twitter and became part of the online community of educators. I blogged with students and helped them set up their own blogs. I ran entire classes via blogging.  But I posted in my own space throughout, and finally pulled my Nucleus posts into my WordPress blog.

In 2012 I participated in the wave of Massive Open Online Classes, and created them for the Program for Online Teaching. That project, with volunteer faculty teaching other faculty how to teach online, had been active since 2005 and would be around till 2017. I blogged about the MOOCs, POT, online pedagogy, etc. The posts are still there.

Since 2017, I have gone back and forth separating and combining blogs, importing and exporting posts as I saw fit. Then when I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, I started a separate author blog as I became a fiction writer, since why would anyone who knew me as an author care about online teaching or educational technology?

As Alan Levine mentioned in his conversation with Maren Deepwell, blogging can seem old-fashioned. With Facebook and Threads and Instagram (oh, wait, that’s all the same thing) and Bluesky and Mastadon, what is the point of writing on a blog? Well, unless you choose to monetize your writing via Substack or Medium (tried that), your blog is the place for long-form thinking in public. It can be, as I’ve rebranded it here, your “webhome”.

Outside of blogging (and inside it’s too dark to see), I struggled with social media as a fiction author. Following all the usual advice, I spent 2023 and 2024 posting continually in FB, Instagram, TikTok, GoodReads. I did Canva placards and videos on YouTube. I put energy into an author newsletter rather than my blog. (Of course, I posted copies of my newsletter on my blog.) I even paid for ads on Facebook and Amazon. I had a few hundred followers as an author, and a few hundred newsletter subscribers.

But nothing I did in these spaces sold any books. That became my new metric for determining how I spend my time doing things I don’t find fun or interesting.

One Blog Alone

So this year I went back to my Lisahistory blog, the one that originally combined ed tech with history. I’ve cut down on social media. I’ve added an author page with its own URL (lisamlane.com) to my one blog, and closed out the separate author blog. I’m working on linking everything to my one blog, slimming down the categories, maybe writing my newsletters here, posting whenever.

Reunited and it feels so good. Blogging is fun and interesting, especially when I remember that I can post about anything I wish. No more “is this an author post? would readers be interested?” or “oh, that’s edtech–where do I put that again?”.

There has been a price: the followers I had elsewhere have been lost. But if they want to, they can find me here, in my webhome, turning on the porch light, letting Jetpack accept subscribers, chatting history and edtech and being a writer, and making a pot of tea for whoever comes by.