4 Years of Blogging!

The title says it all – my blog is turning four!

Four years of my life creating something that could easily disappear due to internetty reasons beyond my control.

Four years honing my writing skills and training my visual eye. Both skills that you need a lifetime to perfect – four years is a good start though.

Four years making new friends, virtual as you might be, but our conversations are real. It makes it all worthwhile. Thank you!

I have my own little blogoversary tradition of creating a photo gallery with 12 photos, posted each month of the past year, and I’m not going to break the tradition. So here you go:

The past blogging year saw me do some things quite differently: I started writing more, and I got more personal. And, cherry on the cake, last month I started co-hosting a photo challenge, a new step for me.

The travel theme became less and less important on my blog – I even became a tad disenchanted with travel in general (how about we leave something for future generations to explore?!) – and I only traveled to Krakow last year.

Another tradition of mine has been to highlight some of my own favorite posts from the past year, in case you missed them. I liked that I was able to get into a creative mood a few times, despite my life being quite hectic at the moment.

My top 7 picks, in a random order:

1. Visiting Porvoo and A Trip Down Memory Lane – because of the colorful photos I stuffed into the post
2. The Invisible Beauty of Pigeons – pondering about daily things
3. Modern Fairytale – a story I enjoyed posting
4. T-Shirt Poem – getting creative (?)
5. A Treasure Impossible Sweet – felt like rhyming!
6. The Time I Wasn’t Glamorous Enough – sudden inspiration to write
7. The Art of Hello – very much enjoyed writing this

Another change I’ve noticed in my blogging self, possibly due to my real life self’s current busyness, is that I’ve lowered my own standards a bit.

For example, I can full well see that the squares in my gallery in this post are unsharp. But there is nothing wrong with the images, and you can check by clicking them open. I tried changing their size but it didn’t help.

Normally, this type of thing would bother the heck out of me and I would google for answers until I solved the problem.

But now… now I’m just going to publish the post as it is, assuming it’s a WordPress glitch in the square gallery that I can’t fix anyway. I could choose a different gallery layout but I only have a couple of options to choose from and I know that the layout will be completely different if I use them – and I want squares this time!

Now I don’t know if lowering standards is good for the blog (probably not!) but I think it’ll be good for my stress levels! I’m going to cruise along at a relaxed pace and enjoy the scenery. I’ll leave the problem-solving to other people. (For now.)

I wish all of you smooth sailing in your blogs and let’s keep chatting!

Thanks for reading – now, and all those other times!