Transitory State
On August 28, 2005, I published my first blog, with Blogger. I had recently returned to Spain after spending the summer in California with my family. My sister-in-law had set up the blog for me a month earlier, while my sons and I were staying with my brother and her in La Mesa. I chose its name, Transitory State, because I was, at the time, in a transitory state of being.
My divorce was about to be finalized (the date of the settlement is, in fact, August 31, 2005–I just looked). I was about to start the school year working for St. Michael’s School, in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), teaching “Infants,” or the year prior to Kindergarten. That spring I had taught the equivalent of Kindergarten (“Preparatory”) and loved the kids, but four-year-olds proved to be far too needy; the next year I switched to secondary, teaching years 7, 10, and 12. That was much better, I love teenagers.
I enjoyed working at St. Michael’s. I loved its quirkiness and the fact that, once I had proven my ability to get along with students and parents alike, I could do pretty much whatever I pleased. I loved the birthday tradition of the birthday person bringing breakfast to everyone (who shared the morning break), usually cookies or cake, but sometimes cava (the Spanish sparkling wine). Since my sons went to school there too, in the same building, it was a one-stop day, with a 20-minute commute from our house in Valdemorillo.
It was a good life, especially once my ex-husband starting taking the boys on the weekends so I could gallop racehorses on the track every Saturday. I had time to write–and wrote several novels that are still waiting for editing.
But, I knew from the beginning that it wasn’t going to last, because I was already making plans to return to the States to go back to college.
I kept up the Transitory State blog with sporadic posts through two moves (Spain to Arcata, CA., Arcata to Norman, OK), till February 2015. It was well-named.
In July 2015 I began my WordPress.com blog.
Jessica E Black
Amazingly enough, I am not entirely sure that was the name of the blog I just closed late last night… and it redirects now to this one!
I do remember starting it. I was in Spain, with my Spanish family (the one that had hosted me as an exchange student in 1988-89), at their beach home in Pobla de Farnals (Valencia). Because I wasn’t sure how much I would blog (after all, my track record wasn’t great), I chose the free version.
This time, however, it worked. Oh I haven’t posted a lot over the last four years. Only 7 in 2018. But, I had an audience (small by most terms, but still…). And over the last year, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of becoming more serious about blogging, maybe trying to monetize it. There are a lot of pros (mainly that I love writing), but the biggest con was that my blog was multipurpose. Its two main topics, horses and research, got the most page views, and I knew that people looking for statistical information really don’t want to scroll through posts about horses, and vice versa.
I had to split my blog in three (this one is Neither Horses nor Research, its working title). I chose Blue Host to host my blogs (it was the best deal, by far, for the features I needed. Note I am using the Choice Plus plan), and so far I am very happy with Blue Host, not so happy with WordPress themes…
And now, after a week of 12-16 hour work days (okay about 1/3 of each day was dedicated to academic work but still), I have Wild Horses and Wild World of Research.
And this blog.
The hardest part of switching to three new blogs:
Losing the page view stats. If there is a way to integrate them (beyond WordPress app, which seems to be integrating my old blog with Wild Horses), I can’t figure it out.
But I’ll post them here.
Tombstone aka closing blog stats
By year:
2015: 482 page views, 23 posts
2016: 2,248, 4 posts
2017: 5,022 pageviews, 11 posts
2018: 5,408 pageviews, 7 posts
2019: 4,654 ppageviews, 4 posts, through yesterday (August 30).
Total: 17,814
By type of page/post:
Homepage/Archives: 2,495
Research/Statistics: 5,699
Horses: 6,982
Everything else: 2,638
The winning posts:
Tips on Using MTurk with Qualtrics: 3,209
Bits, Bosals, and Hackamores: 1,504
Statistics Calculator (page): 1,230
How to Discourage Questioning in an Online Horse Forum: 1,126
In Defense of “Hot” Horses: 841
Review: Zaldi Endurance saddle Endur-Light: 834
Racing vs riding and the US Endurance debate: 820
Sweeney Shoulder: 803 (this is about horses too).
Clearly, I will focus on Wild Horses
But I’ll post in this blog, the catch-all everything else, for fun. After all, this is my first post-blog-splitting post.