Blog Changes

You may or may not have noticed that there have been some changes to my blog. Angelicscalliwags had been a primarily homeschool blog, but three of my students had grown up and the two left worked mainly independently. I wasn’t sure I had anything interesting to write anymore. My blogging became less and less frequent.

If any of you are writers out there, you may understand it when I say I was a little bereft. For me, writing is like the blood in my veins, vital to life and pours out when unrestrained. Bearing this slightly dodgy metaphor in mind, I felt restrained by Angelicscalliwags because I didn’t have much homeschool stuff to talk about. Enter Seasons of Joy.

Seasons of Joy

Last January I began writing another blog called ‘Seasons of Joy’. Seasons of Joy was a monthly blog I wrote on Angelicscalliwags over the years. It was focused more on life in general rather than homeschool. It seemed the natural choice for a name for my new blog.

In Seasons of Joy, I began pouring out my heart over the things that mattered to me at this stage in my life. I was so blessed by a few of you joining me. Once again, I felt unrestrained: that I could write about anything and everything.

It was glorious!

I was out with the twins one day and both turned to me and said how much they missed me writing in my Angelicscalliwags blog. They reminded me that this was a website full of their childhood and now I had abruptly stopped writing, it felt like they had ceased to exist.

Yes, my girls can be a little dramatic at times!

It did get me thinking though. Perhaps Angelicscalliwags could simply transition? So, I made the (hasty) decision to change Angelicscalliwags Homeschool (as it was then) back to Angelicscalliwags, and transfer all the Seasons of Joy posts across.

Whoopsiedoopsie!

This had two rather alarming effects (as I said, I didn’t think this through, at all!):

The first was that I immediately lost my google ranking that I had spent years building up. If one changes one’s website URL, in terms of Google you are a whole different website. I believe once Google trawls my site again, it will pick up. But if you Google my blog, as far as Google is concerned I don’t exist anymore. Apart from my regular readers (thank you, I appreciate you all SO much!), most of my views now come from Pinterest or links from other blogs.

The second was that all my email and WordPress subscribers received all (about 100) posts from Seasons of Joy that I had transferred, all at once. Yikes! I honestly expected most of you to unsubscribe but in reality I only lost two subscribers (again, thank you, thank you, thank you!!).

The one thing I thought was almost certain to happen, didn’t. I thought as soon as I started writing about non-homeschool things, most of the people who had signed up because they wanted homeschool posts would up and leave. Over the past six months, I have only had five people unsubscribe…and that includes the two I lost after the amalgamation debacle!

You guys rock!!

Going Forward

Going forward, Angelicscalliwags will have two main focuses.

The first is homeschool. I still write my homeschool log posts and I still write a couple of posts a week on the Mesopotamia Unit Study I am creating. Also, each week I shall spend sometime making the navigation of my website easier. I have created a homeschool tab, and this will become ever more organised.

The second is Claire. Yes, me. My journal tab will be, well, basically anything that takes my fancy. I will be sharing my art endeavours, my small business efforts, the ups and downs of my health and fitness journey, books, videos… basically, all things Claire.

I have started an Art Studio tab because I want to keep this side of my blog separate, or at least in a separate place. This is a side of me that I have always known existed but have never really explored before. It will include my art journal posts, any teaching posts from my homeschool days, and my home business posts.

Going forward there may also be a shop tab, with links to everything I sell in my small business.

A Huge Thank You

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my loyal readers who have stuck by me during the schizophrenic era of my website. I feel blessed to have you all and I am so incredibly grateful for the friendships I have made over the past decade or so.

One last thing before I go. My contact tab above is set to send me any messages to my email address. Unfortunately, this has not been happening and they have gone into an area of my dashboard called ‘feedback’. As I have been changing my blog somewhat, I clicked on the feedback button, wondering what it was, and lo and behold, it is full of all the messages you guys have left me using the contact tab. I am SO sorry. Obviously, I haven’t responded to any of them on account of not knowing they existed! I will work my way through them over the next few weeks and promise to reply to ALL of them. Again, I’m so sorry I missed them, because I love hearing from you all 🧡

Okay, I’m going to sign off here. Hopefully this post actually makes sense and I haven’t been rambling on for half an hour! Thank you for joining me over the last decade. And here’s to the next decade!