Welcome to my new blog, born from the ashes of the old. Here’s a little history of my blogging activity.
Six years ago, I launched my first professional blog on the UPRM-hosted Edublogs. I’ve had websites and blogs of one kind or another since 1999, but my blogs.uprm.edu/flores became my professional home on the Web.
From the outset, I designed this blog as a source of current information on my academic duties, a chronicle of my professional milestones, and a repository for course blogs, presentations, and feeds from my other online activities. This was a useful space for me– a gateway to all my online resources– rather than a place where I blogged about my interests. My choice of template, Fjords (unchanged for 6 years), offers 4 narrow columns that favor brief entries and constant display of widgetized information. The strength of this approach is in its accumulation, developing into a living curriculum vitae: a shaper of my online identity.
For the past year and a half, I’ve cultivated my voice with a 500-day daily blogging performance: I ♥ E-Poetry. And during my year in Norway as a Fulbright scholar, my professional activity has reached a career-high. I have joined many online conversations and find myself wanting to write about these ideas more expansively than my old blog’s format allows.
And so, rather than changing its design and figure out workarounds to patch it up to social media and the functionality I need, I’m starting fresh with this self-hosted WordPress installation. Thanks to the Jetpack plugin, I have built-in site statistics and social media integration. I’ve imported the 50 entries from my previous blog and will selectively choose old course blogs to feature in my new site. I’ve selected the Responsive theme, which resizes as needed by the varied screen sizes found in the contemporary hardware ecology. This blog is also the heart of a multisites network, which will allow me to create and host all the course blogs I require.
And so, here’s to a new beginning, retooled for a budding academic year of productivity and self-expression.
This should be fun!