Dana said in a comment yesterday that she likes my new digs. I didn’t ask her why, but I feel sure she’ll explain if she feels compelled to do so. I like them, too, and it might be presumptuous of me to say why Dana likes them, but I’m going to give it a stab. It feels like I’m back. I have my own space. I think there was something inhibiting I can’t put my finger on about sharing the former site with Steve. It was never anything he did. It was just that I didn’t feel like the space was mine, even though I had done so much work on it. It felt like it was his, because almost everyone that visited it came there to see him. Everyone who comes here is here to see me. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about me. I guess I was kind of feeling like a guest in my own house. Or, as Rajni so aptly put it, “invisible on [my] own domain.” It was ultimately that comment of Rajni’s that helped me put my finger on it and make the decision to move all my blogs to this other domain that I was reserving for education-related stuff. I’m sooooo glad I did, even though it is turning out to be a lot of work — I have to update links and things like that. It could have been more difficult. MT makes it pretty easy to export and import all your entries. So maybe what Dana likes is the same thing I like — I’m more like myself here. She’s been reading me in my various guises for over four years now — yes, it’s been that long!

It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve felt like my blog was suffering. I blamed it initially on the fact that I was compartmentalizing — I had a Harry Potter blog, an education blog, a classroom blog, and a genealogy blog. Splitting up my interests like that made me wonder if this personal blog wasn’t suffering as a result. Maybe in some ways that’s true, but I think more than anything else, it was the fact that I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute that anyone would want to read. Perhaps that was because of the huge numbers of people who visited PlanetHuff.com just to read his writing and didn’t even seem to realize I was there. I think I was especially mortified by a female reader of his whom I described here (if you put comments on that entry, don’t be offended that I deleted them — I didn’t want you to get involved in case she read it and went after you for what you said; I appreciate the support).

Finally, I wanted to share two things. First, I have installed a plugin called MT Notifier, which will allow you to subscribe to entries so you know when new comments are posted. I don’t expect that to be used a lot over here, but my students will find it useful for my classroom blog, and perhaps readers of my education blog will find it valuable, too. The second thing I wanted to share is Jonathan Coulton. You may have been one of the early ones on the bandwagon, but I didn’t discover him until he’d been “Wil Wheatoned.” His cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “I Like Big Butts” is absolutely awesome. I love it.

Before I close, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing of Rosa Parks. I think Wil Wheaton said it better than I could.