I've been blogged

I like to refer you to the wonderful things I see on the internet and blogosphere, but I suppose I do most of that on facebook these days.  And while occasionally I will write a post that my friends recommend on facebook, rarely do I find my blog referred to from another blog post.  One such person who does so is David Dollar, the other Valleydale blogger.  Although to be fair, many a Valleydalian has attempted blogging:  Nikol Whitten, Robin Kelley, Philip Waters, Suzanne Tullis, Meredith Dunn, Katie Green, Kelly Fisher, Kris Dekker, and Amarilys Barnett just to name a few.  The ones currently still blogging are Nikol, Kelly, and Suzanne, and I bet Robin and Katie will add one soon.  That aside, Mr. Dollar and I are the ones who have gained the most recognition thus far.  He recently included me in one of his posts.  We really do not know one another apart from the blogosphere, but I remember that he helped with the college kids (or was a college kid, but I don't think so) while I was in the singles class with his wife who was single at the time and lived in Georgia most of the time (so I didn't know her very well at all).  Now she works with my husband, albeit in the same company, but not department.  And his father in law used to be my boss once.  And he knew my dad.  Because they worked together too.  So I knew of his family and of him, the blogger back then for a while now, but I did not know I too would be become a blogger, of Valleydale fame, which according to Dave, I am.  That is both cool and embarrassing.  It really is.

This being said, I owe David Dollar a great deal of thanks for bringing traffic to my site.  I get more referrals from him than from anyone else, and next in line, the referrals come from A New Song to Sing, and my bff, Levi's Mom, who I never talk about on here.  But I love her, and she runs a little blog about her son, Levi, and now her daughter, Kara!  Networked blogs and google also send a lot of traffic my way.  The top things people search for that send them to me are mother hen story, scripture memory, and happy harpers.  Write a post about a fairly famous story and you will get traffic.  Comment on big blogs and you will get traffic, though I must say I don't have as much time to network and read other blogs as a good blogger probably should if they are worried about that kind of thing, which I used to, but don't much anymore.

Speaking of kids, you may have noticed that I talk about my kids on here less often.  Originally I started this blog as a way to document family life, but it also quickly became a way for me to release steam and vent about things I had come to internalize.  Some times I wrote about my kids and the crazy things they did that I wasn't sure I could handle any more.  Though I do just run a very small blog, I recognize that it has some notoriety, especially among my Valleydale family.  That being said, I had found I needed to pull back some of the things I said on here for integrity's sake and for the privacy of my children.  Although, I do need to step it up more in the way of some family updates and fun stories.  In the early days of blogging, I made many mistakes, including talking about friends and things I should have never made public, but did so out of earnest cluelessness in the matter at the time.  Now I know there is a certain code of ethics when blogging.  And here in is the rub, who wants to be friends with a blogger, if they are afraid they will be blogged about.  David Dollar does this kind of thing very well, but I'm not sure I know how to do it.