Bring Blogging Back

Maybe there are some of you who feel blogging hasn’t gone anywhere. There are certainly still folks out there who share their thoughts long-form in this way and there may even be a slight resurgence of it now as we are increasingly becoming overwhelmed with the constant and fast paced method of consuming information and stories.

But you also may have missed, or been unaware, or just plain forgotten about the height of the blogging era in its full glory.
I’m talking about the early to mid “aughts” (as I recently learned we call the the 2000’s now, two decades in… yes, I live under a rock sometimes).

The era of early fashion bloggers, before “influencers” were a thing, of delightfully cute and charming and artistic people sharing their travels (before there were drones), of DIY tutorials made in MS paint (Katie Sews anyone? Anyone?) of people in various parts of the world who shared insightful and fascinating perspectives on the place they lived in what was fairly unlike anything you’d ever experienced.
And pretty much all sorts of thought and image based sharing before the height of affiliate links, ads, courses and ebooks, TikTok, reels, and “doing it for the gram”.

I miss the routine I developed around this slower type of consumption.
My generation’s version of sitting down to the breakfast table with your morning newspaper.
Indeed, there were many mornings where I would eagerly sit down at my computer and read through my Bloglovin list of everyone’s latest posts, filled with curiosity, hope and inspiration afterwards.
(When was the last time you felt like that after reading the morning news?)

(Side bar: I just logged in to my Bloglovin account for the first time in over seven years, and was sad to find that out of the over 50 blogs I once followed, only three were still somewhat active. But of those three, each one felt very sales-y and oriented around sponsors and had affiliation link riddled posts. One was the ever timeless Cup of Jo which I discovered is no longer Joanna Goddard sharing her thoughts simply and sweetly every day, but an entire TEAM of people who make the site happen. All well and good, but certainly not what it used to be in the way of simplicity and not very attainable for the rest of us who are drawn to blogging.)

You may or may not know that I used to blog, primarily on A Girl Named Leney which was my previous business for ten years before the pandemic and throwing everything I had into Folkling.
Blogging was how I got a lot of my photography work out in the world starting in 2010. I used to write regularly, and the fact that you can still find these posts is only mildly terrifying to me. It should probably be more terrifying, but when I think about the sheer amount of time I have spent in my life putting these posts together and the fact that they chronicle somewhat of a diary of my life, I somehow cannot bring myself to go in and erase all of them.

But this was my last post, at the end of 2020.
I didn’t realize it at the time, and I think I had the best of intentions to get back to blogging again, but needless to say, nearly three years later, the learning curve of opening a brick & mortar shop has left me with no time for sharing a whole lot of long-form thoughts.

Because that’s what thoughtful blogging requires right?
Time.
Largely undistracted time, to actually accomplish it fully and WHO has that these days? To say nothing of our phones in and of themselves, my husband Owen in the past 20 minutes I have been sitting here trying to finish writing this post (because I started it yesterday, when I was in the shop, and I quickly discovered that writing a blog post during open shop hours was zero possible...) had to tell me about the history of Rhodesia (brought about by our seeing a Rhodesian Ridgeback the night before) and then about this Lego submarine that he saw on Instagram that he can’t stop thinking about.

But I digress.

This is a lot of words to simply say, that I have missed this type of sharing. This type of intentional process.
I have been desperately trying to slow down this past year.
Shifting my life to find time once again to do the things I enjoy, outside of my work.
Writing again, feels like one of those important things that I’d like to get back to.

So you might be seeing more of this sort of thing here under The Journal section of our website.
But mostly, overall, I hope this (if you got this far, bless you…) inspires you to slow down and make more time for something you enjoy doing.

And if you feel like sharing what that thing is in the comments below, I would love to read about it.

xo

Leney