A Year with a Weblog

Recently a freelance writer contacted me about a magazine article she was writing about weblogs. She was interested in interviewing me about Raspberry World. I suggested we do the interview by e-mail, and spent the last few days composing the following answers to her questions. Since my weblog is a year old tomorrow (June 1), I thought I might post these answers as a journal entry.

What is your name?  Susannah

Your profession specifically?  I am a writer/editor – basically a one-person editorial department – in the marketing division of a large company. I manage all types of publications for internal customers, develop intranet sites and content, and teach business writing classes to employees.

Were you very computer-fluent when you decided to start your web site and on-line journal? I was fairly comfortable with the computer, although I had never had any formal training. I had been a graduate student and an English instructor for several years (at Penn State), so I was very familiar with word processing, e-mail, and file management. I taught myself HTML, with the help of a book, in the summer of 1997. I started Raspberry World in February 1998; it was my third web site. I added the first weblog in June 2000.

I noticed that you maintain an on-line journal as well as an ongoing web log. Can you explain how, in your mind, the two differ?  The easy answer is, my online journal is a place for stand-alone entries on “serious” subjects, while the weblog is the place for quick “what I did today” entries. That’s not completely accurate, of course. There’s a lot of silly stuff in my “serious” journal (see the entry on toast), and sometimes I use the weblog to talk about serious things.

I guess it’s more a question of how much time I invest in each of them. Journal entries tend to be longer and more polished than weblog entries. They have individual titles and are collected in an archive. The weblog is usually something I update quickly, and although it is just as “permanent” as the journal, I don’t think of it as something people are likely to go back and read later on. The weblog entries are archived, but they don’t have titles and are simply lumped together by month. I don’t look back at the weblog much, although I do look back at the journal quite frequently.

There’s also a difference in the tone and my relationship to the audience in the weblog and journal. The journal is more reflective, and seems more like something I write for myself and then share with others. The weblog is more immediate and has a much stronger sense of being written for an audience. In the weblog I write things like, “Check this out,” and “Did you know?” I do sometimes use second person in my journal entries, but generally not so directly.

What made you want to start this web-log? (A way to keep in touch with family and friends out-of-town, a means of self-expression? Please explain) While the weblog has become both of those things, it originally grew out of my desire to make Raspberry World easier to update on a more regular basis. I also wanted to pull together the different sections of the site, and a weblog seemed like a good tool for that. It’s like a combination “what’s new” page and mini-journal.

Raspberry World started off as a personal site with a journal and a few other sections (recipes, book reviews, links). The journal was never updated on a regular basis, only when I found myself thinking about something I felt I needed to write about. But after a few months I realized that sometimes I just wanted to write something small – for instance, just say something about what I was reading, or the music I was listening to, or what I had done that day. At the time I thought of my online journal as a kind of “serious” space, and it didn’t seem like the place for these mini-updates, so I started the Today page, which I really think of as the precursor to the weblog.  The Today page had several purposes, such as being a “what’s new” page where I listed any updates to the rest of the site. This became the first page my regular readers would check on each visit, to see what I was up to and what had been updated on Raspberry World.

A couple of years later, I discovered the Blogger application (it was already a year or so old by then). Immediately I realized this was a tool that could make it even easier to run the Today page. I was impressed with how easy Blogger was to set up and use, and how simple it was to update. Even better, I could update from anywhere, as long as I had web access. No more messing around with changing HTML files every day and uploading them through FTP. I felt liberated! So I archived the old Today page and started using Blogger in its place.  The weblog was intended to fill the same role as the Today page: it allowed me to update quickly, with shorter entries that were less serious than what I wrote in the journal.

During my latest redesign of Raspberry World (November 2000), I decided to move the weblog out to the front page, where it is now. Since most readers check it first, it seemed like placing it on the front page would improve the useability of my site.

These days, the weblog does serve as a means of self-expression, and a way for people to keep up with what I’m doing. But still, I tend to save more serious topics for the journal. The weblog’s primary function is to keep a record of my day-to-day thoughts and activities.

What advantages do you find in having a web log as opposed to a traditional journal?  I would like to include my online journal in this answer – so I will tell you what advantages there are for me in keeping personal writing online, whether in a weblog or a journal.

The biggest benefit is having an audience. I’ve kept journals since I was a child, but very intermittently. I tend to lose interest after awhile, and I rarely manage to fill up a notebook. Having a regular audience (and getting feedback from time to time) has made me more interested in continuing my journal online. I am in the fourth year of keeping a journal on Raspberry World, and that’s a lot longer than I’ve ever managed to maintain one journal before now.

However, there are still things I write about and don’t put online. Some topics are just too personal, or would perhaps hurt someone’s feelings. So I still write entries that I don’t share on Raspberry World. What you see online is just the part of my journal that I feel like sharing with the public.

This is from my “Who I Am” page, and it’s also part of the answer to this question: “The web offered a creative outlet unlike paper journals or anything else, and that’s still what keeps me interested. I love having the freedom to address any topic that interests me, through both writing and design, and all for an audience, too.”

Do you spend a lot of time surfing the web to find good links?  Not really, since I mostly write about myself and my own life. The links I include are just things I’ve happened across and think are worth saving. Sometimes I’ll link to an article I found interesting, or the web site of a museum I’ve visited. Sometimes I’ll highlight somebody else’s journal on my site; I always appreciate it when other journalers link to mine. But often days will go by without any links, and I’ll just update on what’s happening in my life.

Are good links essential to the web log? They’re not essential to the Raspberry World weblog, but I think the answer to this question varies a lot depending on the purpose of the weblog. Many of the weblogs I read and love are not link-driven at all, such as Wockerjabby. Others are totally link-driven, like Who Would Buy That?

Why the name Raspberry World? Well, I really like raspberries. I wanted something that sounded bright and upbeat. My original design for the site included graphics of raspberries, and although I’ve moved away from that, I expect the page will always be pink. I do get mail from people asking questions about raspberries sometimes, but I just write them back and tell them I’m only a fan, not an expert.

How many (average) hits a day?  40 - 50

Do you have a regular readership?  Yes. My regular readership is a combination of people who know me (family, friends, people I’ve met online) and people who stumble across the page, like it, and keep coming back. I correspond with several readers, although there seem to be many more who visit regularly but have never written me directly. I admit that I sometimes wonder who those anonymous readers are, and how they found my site.

Many journal and weblog sites have a much larger regular readership and more vocal readers; some even have discussion boards where regular visitors can discuss the content of the site with the journaler. A lot of the more popular journal writers seem to know each other and regularly comment on each others’ journals in their entries. I’ve never been very active in that whole “online journal community,” though, so my main contact with readers is through e-mail. I am always happy to hear from people who read my site. [write me!]

You mention in your web site that you have made friends through your site. Can you expand on that?  When someone writes me about my journal, that person already “knows” me, in a way. At least, they know something about what I think about things. Generally, people write because they feel we share some common ground, and they want to comment on something I’ve written on the site. Sometimes when that happens, we strike up an e-mail correspondence. In a few cases, this has led to very good friendships, complete with cross-country visits and lots of long-distance phone calls. I have two very close friends I first met when they wrote to comment on Raspberry World.

Honestly, in the 10 years that I have been online (first e-mail, then the Web), I have had great luck with online relationships. Several of my closest friends are women I met online. (However, I met my husband the old-fashioned way.)

Please add any other thoughts on web logs that you would like.  To me, the weblog is actually more of a tool or a concept than it is a particular type of writing. You can make a weblog be anything you want – from a collection of links on a specific topic, to a full-fledged journal. I, myself, have several weblogs. The front page of Raspberry World is my main one, but I also use a weblog application to run my music log and a couple of other pages.

One of my weblogs (no longer online) was a very personal journal that I kept for several months while recovering from a miscarriage. The weblog worked well as a journal in that case, because I wanted a space where I could be very focused on that one topic, without turning all of Raspberry World into a site about recovering from a miscarriage. I wrote about the experience a bit in my regular online journal, but my day-to-day entries on dealing with the loss were all in the weblog. I chose to use a weblog because I could update it from anywhere (including work), anytime I was thinking about something or wanted to write something down. It was a journal that was built on the technology that makes weblogs possible for the average user, but it wasn’t a weblog in the most common sense. There was hardly a single link in the whole thing.

Any advice to people wanting to start their own web log?  Just head on over to Blogger or another weblog application and try it out. I’ve only used Blogger myself, and I’ve been very impressed with its ease of use. My experience with it has encouraged many of my friends to try it out, and they like it too. You don’t even have to have your own server space to use it; you can use Blogspot, Blogger’s free hosting service. You can make the design as plain or as fancy as you like, and there are even ready-made templates for beginners. You can even set it up so readers can leave comments about your entries. And if you start one, and decide it’s not right for you, it only takes a moment to delete it for good.

To me, the best thing about weblogs (like journals) is that they can be anything you want them to be. The weblog application makes it easy for you, as a writer, to focus primarily on content. A weblog can be a whole site or just one little part of a site (like mine). It can be truth or fiction. It can be private (to some extent) or very public. A weblog can be interactive, or not. If you want it to be a journal, it can do that. If you just want to list links, it can do that too. It expands or contracts to fit the size of your content, and you can fill it up with whatever you want. In that way, it’s like a journal, and it’s not much harder to use than a journal. If you’re interested in writing online for an audience, a weblog is one of the easiest ways to get your writing onto the web.

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