I hope you had a good Christmas and are now recovering from any excess of food, drink, travel, shopping and catching up with family and friends that we can experience at this time of year.
My sympathies to all in the mid West, North East of the USA, Eastern Ontario and Quebec who had their holidays and travel disrupted by storms, tornadoes and heavy snowfalls. We were very fortunate here in South West Ontario to only get about 100 mm (4″) of snow on Boxing day night with strong but not damaging winds.
Parts of the UK had bad floods over the Christmas period and storms affected other parts of the world.
This week is an ideal opportunity to reflect on the past year, recognise what went well, what we can learn from what did not and build on that to prepare for the year ahead. I published a post on the system I use at this time last year so I am not going to repeat it. Here is the link. Archiving the past year.
One of the successes for me is that this blog has now been accepted in the Life topic by Alltop. Alltop is a great resource for reviewing your favourite blogs quickly. It is different to Google Reader which I also use. It is free to join and very simple to set up your own My Alltop page where you can easily see a brief summary of your favourite blogs.
Check it out by clicking on the badge below.
This blog has survived almost 4 years on this site and a few months before that on an earlier site. Many thousands of words written. Some times posts have been inconsistent because as I wrote recently, life does get in the way. At other times, it has been a huge test of my commitment to publish regularly, but it has been a great lesson in self-discipline and a valuable learning experience.
The learning experience includes the technical side of blogging, setting up WordPress, design, themes, plugins. As well as developing the creative skills to find topics to write about, improve language skills, sharpen up long forgotten rules of grammar and use words correctly.
As evidenced by an increasing number of successful boomer and senior bloggers, creating and regularly publishing to a blog is an excellent way to stimulate your brain and maintain an active interest in life. The costs are minimal, or zero for a non self-hosted blog. You do not need to be physically fit and you can do it from the comfort of your home.
Our generations’ stricter education without the benefit of computers, white-out (tippex) gives us a distinct advantage in reading and writing over the millenials brought up on a diet of texting and 140 character tweets.
The blogging community is rich in diversity, I follow some blogs that cover topics or appeal to demographic groups far removed from my own. Good or bad, they all provide an opportunity to learn and improve my own efforts.
If you do not already publish a blog, here is a challenge. Set yourself a goal of starting a blog for the New Year. It can be on any topic you enjoy or feel strongly about. Some highly successful blogs were started to share information on a hobby and have grown into income generating businesses.
When you start, leave a comment with a link so we can visit your blog.
Wishing you success.
