Anyone who has been following along with me on my blogging journey will be aware that I’ve been frustrated with the application of WordPress of late. Recently I was so frustrated that I made a hasty decision to discontinue blogging. I switched off all the auto re-news and was set to just let the blog drift off into the ether.

However, one of my blogging friends wrote a post recently on blogging, and why she blogs. Whilst Amanda’s reasons for blogging didn’t particularly resonate with me, one of the comments added to that post has prompted me to re-think my hasty decision. The reason I started blogging in the first place was so as friends and family would be aware of where we were,and what we were doing as we travelled around this great big country of ours. The full time travel stopped but the blog continued becoming a bit of a personal diary, a record of our daily lives, and at times, my personal thoughts.

Originally, the blog was supposed to be a travel blog with the ‘ow’ in lifeofrileyow.com representing ‘on wheels’. Our home at the time was where ever we parked our fifth wheeler, anywhere in this big, beautiful country of ours. When we settled back into a house, the original purpose of the blog had disappeared, but the blog was still serving a purpose. It had become a place to record our day to day lives, and our favourite photographs. The blog became as eclectic as I am, a record of my fibberty jibbert personality and a record of our life, I wanted the ‘ow’ to represent the things I write about, and as I write about whatever takes my fancy it seemed appropriate for the ‘ow’’ to represent ‘on whatever’.

So, after a re-think, the blog is to continue. However, it’ll change from now on. I’ve thought long and hard about why I like blogging, and why I was going to stop. I like blogging because I enjoy writing. I love the diary aspect of my blog, the recording of my day to day life and, at times, my thoughts. I sort of lost track of all that when I started writing for my followers. That’s when I started to feel pressured into keeping up appearances. When the technical side of blogging became frustrating (I’m a techno numpty), I became agitated and was feeling the pressure of presenting sub-standard posts for people to read, and I decided I wasn’t up to this blogging thingie. But you know what – I’m just going to continue writing for me. Anyone who follows along is very welcome of course, but from now on I’m not going to try and keep to a theme (like I could anyway), I’m not going to worry if my content gets repetitive (Broome year after year after year), and I’m not going to worry about tags, or categories, or photo alignment. I’m not even going to worry to much about spelling and grammatical errors. I’m just going to continue to write on ‘whatever’ without the pressure of trying to appeal to my followers. And then writing and blogging will return to being the pleasure it once was.