1 Year Blogiversary: Part 1 — A Bumbling Beginning

Thursday, November 5th, marks the one year anniversary of this blog. A momentous occasion. I'm surprised President Obama (whose cabinet I "chose" in my second blog post) didn't make it a national holiday.

To celebrate, I thought I would do two things. First, I'm writing a history of My Year In Blogging and, like any good blogger worth her salt, I'm going to do a giveaway. (Don't get too excited. I don't have corporate sponsorship—just some stuff I have that is kind of interesting and I'm willing to part with. Lame, I know, but what can I say—this blog is running in the red.)

To avoid an insanely long post, I'm breaking it up into several parts to be published this week, and it will end with a giveaway.

A Bumbling Beginning

AKA When I was a template-changing-widget-adding-daily-posting-clueless-newbie-blogger

I got into blogging via Facebook. I had posted a list of books I'd read in 2008 in my Notes section and my college buddy Colleen gave me a link to her blog, which had a review for a book she thought I might like. I wandered on over to this mysterious "blog" and was instantly entranced. "Hey!" I thought, "This looks kind of cool. Maybe I can do this too." I joined Blogger immediately and willy-nilly gave my blog an address I would regret later. (I joined Blogger without doing any homework on blogging platforms. If I had, I would have probably gone with Wordpress instead as they seem to have better features.)

Note To Newbie Bloggers: Think about your blogging platform and blog name before starting your blog.

Note To Newbie Bloggers: Less is more when it comes to your blog design. Don't stuff it full of widgets. Trust me, I know!

My first post was entitled "Why Blog?" and I'm actually impressed with my foresight as to why I was doing this. I'll admit, I spent the first few weeks as a blogger changing my template every few days and adding widgets like they were going out of style. I also posted almost every day—despite the fact that no one was reading my blog outside of a few friends who I kept bothering about it.

Believe it or not, at one point the name of my blog was Jenners Jabbers. How awful is that? I then changed it to Life With A Little One and More and that stuck. (Of course, my blog URL doesn't match my blog title to my endless annoyance. I may or may not do something about that someday.)

Anyway, I had a blast those heady first weeks—I wrote my little heart out and was so jazzed about the whole blogging thing. Mr. Jenners—mindful of the fact that I tend to get excited about stuff and quit soon after—smiled patiently and waited for my enthusiasm to pass. (Haha ... joke's on you, Mr. Jenners.) Mr. Jenners never really gave me a hard time about blogging though. His only rule was that I couldn't post photos of the Little One.

I started visiting other blogs and found these mysterious things called memes, which I started joining up willy nilly. This led to some of my first comments from people I didn't already know and began Phase 2 of my blogging career.