Love in Present Day Blogging #AtoZChallenge

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging in the Present

Blogging in the present is so ridiculously difficult. My most successful years of A to Z have been when I wrote all of my posts before April so I could dedicate more time to interacting with bloggers instead of trying to stay caught up. I planned to do the same for my blog posts here. Except...I didn’t. I don’t know why, but there wasn’t inspiration. So I let it go, made sure I knew when I was due for another blog, and didn’t stress about it.

But now that the time has come to write my post for L, I am glad that I didn’t write this one in advance. The world looks very different now than it did a month ago (particularly for those in the hardest hit areas for the dreaded virus). Life is so different. So whereas my blog posts written over the last few months haven’t been impacted, this post definitely is.

As I have viewed blogs from all over the world these last few weeks, I have seen many people struggling with how to handle this worldwide crisis. Address it? Pretend it isn’t happening? (For the purposes of blogging, of course.) The truth is, there isn’t one right answer. Each blogger has to decide for themselves if they will dive into a fantasy world of fiction (as I have) or stay in the reality of the world we live in today. But what I have seen, and hope to continue to see, is an outpouring of love. Love for fellow humans. Love for fellow bloggers. Stay safe and spread some blog LOVE.

And please share with us something you LOVE today.

~Jayden R. Vincente (adult fiction writer)

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Keeping the Tradition #atozchallenge

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The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging in the Present

Whether you blog several times a day, several times a month, or several times a year, you're keeping the great tradition of blogging alive. Whether your blog is for music or politics or memoir or poetry or cat pictures or anything else, you're participating in a vital function of the Internet: bringing people together. Blogging has been around since the foundation of the Internet, but even before that, there were LISTSERV mailing lists, bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, chat rooms and many other ways of communication across the Internet. Even as those earlier forms of communication became Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, which further morphed into Instagram and TikTok and WhatsApp, blogging remains.

Why? Because blogging fills a need that neither the old forms nor the newer forms of electronic communication accomplish: It presents the blogger as an individual. Your blog is your living room. When people come to your blog, they're coming to see you specifically. Can Facebook say the same?

There will always be a need for a place where people to fully express themselves, and in the face of occasionaly-draconian Terms of Service at social media sites limiting what you can say, your blog is your own platform where you can get away with saying about anything you want. Terms of Service on blogging platforms are far more liberal, giving you more of a free rein over what you say and how you say it.

So, let's continue this tradition and express ourselves freely, while we still can.

Do you feel that you can say anything you want on your blog?

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John's Choice For "A Blog With 2020 Vision" #atozchallenge

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

***A Blog with 2020 Vision***

Janet Miles is my pick for "a blog with 2020 vision." Janet's blog is Janet's Smiles. I first got to know Janet when she asked about how to "simulcast" her blog on Wordpress. I had written a post on how to do this from Wordpress to Blogger, and she wanted to know if it worked the other way. I think my answer was "it should," and she managed to set it up with little or no help from me. You can find her Wordpress "simulcast" here. We've been "blog buddies" ever since.

Janet is a scrapbooker, and she and her husband and/or daughters attend a lot of concerts in the Bay Area. She takes lots of photographs and keeps track of the set lists. She then turns these memories into scrapbook pages, and does beautiful work. This year, she's sharing the scrapbook pages she's created. They're truly works of art, and she writes a "mini-review" of each show. It's almost as good as being there yourself.

By all means, stop by Janet's blog(s) to admire her work and to say "Hi!"

Who would you choose, just based on what you've seen so far?

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