Bump on the Blog

It truly has been quite a long time since I have posted anything , and if you are still subscribed thank you for not dropping the feed.  In going over the reasons in my head, why I have not posted for quite some time I came to the realization that, mostly, I was just providing excuses in an attempt to justify my “tuning out”.  Truth be told, I just haven’t felt much like writing the past few months.  Life has been pretty busy, and blogging just seemed to get pushed to the back burner.  That said, over the past couple of weeks a new spark has been lit and I have made a promise to myself to get back into the swing of things.  I, first, needed to take care of a couple of items that have really been causing me some frustration, starting with moving my site over to a new hosting provider.  Hosting the site myself, on an old Gateway computer, just proved to be too much of a headache.  Load times were too slow, WordPress would time out when trying to post,  my own school district was blocking my site as a result of the DNS service I was utilizing, and, honestly, the age of the computer/server led to some internal anxiety that one day I would wake up and everything would be lost….not a good feeling.  Another challenge facing me was to get my digital life organized.  The widespread password-protected accounts, emails, subscriptions, feeds, personal websites, etc…. were just increasing  my frustration level.  It was time to thin out Google Reader, set up Thunderbird to retrieve messages from many email accounts, set up a password manager, and really just sit back and think about the magnitude of sites I am currently a member of.   If this disorganization led to a level of frustration in myself, I can only imagine the kind of frustration less “exposed” teachers go through as we show and encourage use of these constantly changing digital tools.  With that in mind, I have decided to begin putting together a workshop that address some of the strategies I am currently putting in place…a workshop about organizing one’s digital life.  I’m sure in the future, I will be writing more about this.  In the meantime, thanks again for sticking around, I’ve been away far too long….and don’t forget to subscribe to my new feed.
-Brian