An Updated Space For All

Hi everyone.  The blog has been down for the past week so that I could make some pretty dramatic changes.  First and foremost, thank you for sticking around for the unveiling!!!  I want to talk a little bit about why I decided to make these updates before I list them for you.

Since late 2008 I’ve been writing updates on a website for our friends and family to let them experience the joy of my first pregnancy along with us.  Once Alexa was born I decided to take all the old content and turn it into a blog.  It was an easier format to post daily, weekly, monthly updates for our loved ones.  The summer after Alexa was born I decided I also needed a private space to talk about my experiences as a new mother.  I started Unlikely Mama and that’s when the “real” blogging started.  I met tons and tons of women, fellow mothers, who I could commiserate with through our own platforms and on Twitter.  I had two worlds that I kept very very separate.

Sadly a year later I decided to close up shop on that private world.  I lost my writing groove, and I lost a lot of close friends in the process.  I took a year off, but kept updating the family blog with random milestone updates about our little girl.  I felt a void.  Sure I was writing about our lives together and keeping a digital scrapbook on the blog and on Flickr, but I was missing that connection I had with my online friends.

Finally, this past Spring I decided to start writing about personal topics again on Not Mommy.  I was going through a lot of changes, least of which was the journey to becoming a mother of two!  Once again, two lives, two blogs, two personas.  I lost the will to keep that up.  In the Fall you may have noticed that the topics on this blog became more wide reaching and that the posts became less sporadic.

The reason for the increase was because I was starting the process of merging my two online worlds.  I was putting out feelers to make sure the “deeper” topics didn’t freak my real life people out, HA!  I was also attempting to bring my readers from the “mommy blog” world over to a less genre specific site.  I hope I succeeded.

Now that the new year is here I’m working on those New Years Resolutions that I wrote about a few weeks ago.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Backwards Life is now self-hosted.  That means that instead of running on the free WordPress.com I’m now paying for hosting and using the content management code from WordPress.org.  It’s all very techy and boring to most, but it gives me so much more flexibility.
• I’m going to start doing some giveaways to draw in new readers and new followers/fans on Twitter and Facebook.  I have one planned to start this weekend, it’s an awesome product to say Thank You and YIPPIE!
• Next month I will start offering ad space.  I’m going to do something a little different and I’ll write more about it later, but I’m excited.
• I want to make this a Sponsor/PR friendly space, and hope to toss in a few reviews.
• I’ve loaded a new design and am working with a long time bloggy friend on lots of customization!

So that’s it for now.  I’m still working on the layout so some placement of things may change from time to time, but the content will still keep coming.  Remember to subscribe if you want this in your email or Feed reader.