Back From My Break

I'm not sure how many people realized it, but I took about a week hiatus from Facebook and my blog.  OK, technically I haven't posted on my blog in well over a week.  Part of the reason was because we've been busy (I'll write about some of that later), but the main reason is because I wanted to rethink whether I even want to keep using Facebook and keep up with my blog.

When I first started my blog, my goal was to stay in touch with family and friends once we moved to Australia.  When we discovered we would not be moving to Australia and started touring around the US in our travel trailer I was hopeful I would end up with other homeschoolers following what we were doing.  Needless to say, the travel only lasted 3 months and I have only one follower outside of my family and long-time friends.  A bit discouraging to say the least.

So what's a girl to do when things aren't going the way she had hoped?  Regroup.  And that's what I've been doing the last week or so.  I have decided that I'm going to keep doing the blog, but my focus will be on informing friends and family of what we are doing and not worrying about how many followers I have.  I know the grandparents are particularly fond of hearing and seeing what we are doing and my blog is a great forum to share it with everyone all at once.

I am not planning on closing my Facebook account any time soon either, but I did learn that I don't have to check it nearly as often as I was before.  It was kind of nice having all that "free" time to do other things.

They're Watching

I haven't been at this blogging thing for very long and when I first set it up, I did so very quickly and without really thinking much about how I wanted it to look and what information I was willing to let people know about me.  Over the last few days I've been looking at some of those things.

For example, I've changed the design that appears in the background.  I've updated some of the personal information about me, and I've removed the list of names of people who are "following" my blog.  I still have a few more things I want to do, I just haven't had the time to get to it all.

Today I discovered that basic information is being collected about how many times each blog entry is read (the most popular being my tribute to my mom - which I think is really cool).  It can even tell me what kind of computer most of my followers use (Mac) and which web browser is the most popular (Firefox).  Don't worry, if you are not one of those people who is "officially" following my blog, I have no idea who you are.  All I know is what county you live in (most popular is US, but there is at least 1 person from 9 other countries that have at least looked at one of my blog posts).  Kinda cool since I can only account for 2 of them.

It is amazing to me, how computers and the Internet has made such things so easy.  (To be honest, part of me thinks it's cool and another part is scared!)

I am surprised though, that anyone who doesn't know me would even be interested in reading anything I've written.  Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have considered doing this if I was worried people would stumble across what I've written.  It's just that I'm writing stuff about my daily life and I just figured it's not that interesting to people who don't know me.  That said, maybe those people who are considered paranoid because they are convinced people are watching our every move are onto something.