About this blog

Come in, come in!

In terms of renovations, this one has been a doozy. In fact, it’s more like a knockdown and complete new build, rather than a simple makeover.

For the tech-savvy among us, we’ve ditched Joomla and moved to the wonderful world of WordPress. I must say, I am loving it! The backend is simple, clear and very user friendly. And for anyone thinking of starting a blog (and I highly recommend it as a cheap alternative to therapy) go WordPress!

My blogging arc

I’ve been at it for awhile now, since 2007 when my daughter was just one month old. That was my first blog, for the Courier-Mail, the MumSaid blog. I look back on those blogging days, where I was blogging up to four or five times a day and I realise that while it was draining to be tied to the computer for that much of the day, it was satisfying and very rewarding.

Then I decided to strike out on my own, be more things to more people than simply a blog. I embraced the world of giveaways, reviews and had plans to bring even more features to the website. My new home was www.mooreformums.com.au and we were attempting to wrangle Joomla.

After almost two years of limping down that path, I came to the painful realisation that what I love is just the writing side of it, the blogging.

Frustration kills creativity

Joomla is essentially designed for developers who know what they’re doing – and I don’t. I don’t understand CSS, SQL databases, PHP or Javascript – all essential aspects of Joomla.

I found the long and involved process of getting each blog post published was killing my enthusiasm for blogging. And so the posts dwindled to once a month. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say, it’s that I didn’t have the two hours required to manage the behind-the-scenes machinations required for each blog.

Blogging’s ethical questions

So now we’re going to see how WordPress goes. Maybe my love of blogging is diminishing. It happens. In the mummy blogosphere, as children age and the problems become less intense (sleep deprivation, teething, weaning and toilet training can kill a new mum, or at least that’s how it feels) we develop our own parenting routine and rely less and less on the support provided by the mummy blogging community.

Also, as our children age and become net surfers of their own, the biggest ethical question eventually faces us all – how much of my child’s privacy do I have the right to invade? How much of my children’s problems are mine to publish online? How much can I safely blog about before reaching a point where my children will be offended, insulted or embarrassed?

Here at chez Moore we’re facing that exact question and I’ve been grappling with it for a while. My son’s recent eye surgery was an issue I thought about deeply before blogging about. I decided that there’s no real risk (there’s always a small risk) of him deciding later in life that I shouldn’t have said anything. Eye surgery doesn’t carry a stigma. There’s no need to keep it secret, to hide it from peers.

But there are other issues that are quite clearly intensely private affairs. And as a family – meaning my husband and I – we must decide what is fair game and what should be kept private.

So I’m embarking on a new chapter of my blogging life and one that is filling me with much anticipation and hope. Hope for what? Hope that I might find a couple others who understand and like what I’m writing about, hope that a new community will spring up in this new web address, hope that I’ll finally shed 20kgs. That’s a whole lotta hoping!

Felicity Moore