My first foray into the world of blogs — bloggery? the blogosphere? — was an attempt to create a searchable archive of my field journals courtesy of the proto-Blogger, which was developed by a group of lovely young geeks who called themselves Pyra Labs. But when Google bought Pyra Lab's Blogger, they messed me up by excluding the first 12 years worth of my journals. They established 1990 as the earliest date they would allow for backdating entries and held firm despite my hysterical protests. After a period of despair, I discovered WordPress, which would let me backdate to 1970, and I switched to them. I can't say I've gotten very far in typing all my old journal records into my new blog, but at least I've started, and every once in a while I post a new block of entries.

My Naturalist's Almanac

Several years ago I started cutting and pasting my Naturalist's Almanac Web site entries to Blogger so I would be able to edit and add entries myself, but I soon discovered that WordPress had more features and was easier for me to work with so my WordPress version is the one I will be developing. I have even managed to figure out how to manipulate dates behind the scenes to make this version start with January 1 and end with December 31 — no mean feat in the blogosphere, which runs backward, from present to past. For a bookish person like me, I am pleased to have my own blog-based version of A NATURALIST'S ALMANAC that begins at the beginning and ends at the end of one calendar year.

My Homework for a Vision 

HOMEWORK FOR A VISION is another of my old Blogger blogs that has since been replaced by a WordPress version. It began as an effort to figure out what my life is all about. I declared all my hard work as well as my confusion and uncertainty about what I'm doing, exploring, considering, and wondering about HOMEWORK FOR A VISION. By thinking about my life that way, everything — even my mistakes, false starts, discouragements, setbacks, and wasted time — seems meaningful. This is my most personal blog

My CommonPlace 

The only other of my old Blogger blogs that I pay any attention to is my COMMONPLACE — a collection of quotations that I didn't want to lose because they struck me as important or interesting or thought provoking. Every once in a while I still read through those original 50 to see if they all still resonate, and they still do. In the meantime, I've started developing a new WordPress COMMONPLACE, and because WordPress lets me categorize my quotes, I started adding more and a greater variety of quotations. At this point my old Blogger version includes only my original 50 quotations, while my WordPress version includes those 50 plus over 20 more.

My Factoids Blog

Of my WordPress blogs, of which I have more than 20 at the moment, my FACTOIDS blog is the only one that resembles a real blog. It is also the one that's growing fastest of its own accord. I began FACTOIDS to keep track of bits of important information I didn't want to lose, but it soon became a repository for all kinds of things I felt like underlining or clipping when I was zapping through all the newspapers and magazines I read. I'm a little overwhelmed by the volume of information I'm accumulating and the increasing length of my entries, but I've decided to let this blog evolve to see where it might be taking me....