when a blog comes of age

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ramaarya_kanyakumari

Those of you following my blog from before the 24th of July, 2016 may have noticed its new URL. It was changed from returnoftheprodigal.wordpress.com to ramaarya.wordpress.com on the 25th. Why? Because the blog had grown beyond being about just one chapter of my life. 🙂

I’ve been blogging since 1999. Yup, it’s been a long time! I’d just finished studying coding through a part-time course and had created rama-arya.com [a travel blog and image library] which I used till 2010. In between I moved to London for 13 months and wrote a blog on my weekend sojourns to various parts of the city and the English counties. I called it ramastravels.wordpress.com though a friend claimed it sounded like a travel agency. 😛

At the crossroads of 2013-14, I moved to Bombay and started blogging at Return of the Prodigal [returnoftheprodigal.wordpress.com]. I literally felt I had come home, though Bombay was never on my agenda or in my history.

The result of nearly two decades of blogging was that I had multiple blogs with different addresses scattered in the online space. I am a sucker for being organised so you can well imagine my discomfort about this.

Ten months ago, hence, I started on an extensive and intensive consolidation exercise in my spare time, deleting the subsequent defunct accounts as I carried along.

The renaming of the consolidated blog would not have been possible without the support of WordPress’ Happiness Engineers. They were fantastic. They updated my internal links and transferred both my WordPress email followers [yes, you guys; I am not on twitter], and even my ‘freshly pressed’ WordPress badge from returnoftheprodigal.wordpress.com. Together with a site redirect, voilà, 10 months of work culminated seamlessly.

My 18 years of blogging is now all in one place at ramaarya.wordpress.com. From my solo travels through China and South Africa, to my weekends in various nooks and crannies of England; from unravelling Bombay to the roads less trodden in Iran and Bhutan; from sharing my love for contemporary Indian art to giving back initiatives I volunteer at. It is all here, and my penchant for organisation has been assuaged. I tell myself, my blog has come of age.

In closing, I would like to thank you all, dear readers, in utmost sincerity for being with me through my blogging journey. Thank you. I would not be ‘blogging’, if it were not for you. ❤

23 thoughts on “when a blog comes of age”

  1. Hi Rama, congrats on your new url! Although am no longer on the WP reader, I’m following your posts (old & new) whenever you share on twitter…because I enjoy reading your blog 🙂 Looking forward to read more! Cheers.

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  6. I’m relatively new to blogging, and I’ve always wondered what happens when you’ve churned out hundreds of posts! Thanks, this was a great help!!:)

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    • Hello taigaboy, am glad you found the post useful! If there are two things I have learnt, blogging over the years and ending up with a large number of posts is: 1) Categorise posts according to topics and themes, and use pages as site maps. It helps visitors navigate through your blog. 2) Consolidate your blogs if you have multiple ones scattered all over the online space like I did. It is easier to update, keep track of, and comes up quicker on google search. Plus visitors know you are a committed serious blogger who did not start enthusiastically and then abandoned the ship. 🙂

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      • I have catergorised posts as much as I can, but from my end, my blog is kinda bland. Could you tell me how to make menus and a seperate follow button and all that? If it’ll take too long, that’s fine, but it looks like you know your stuff, as you have many hundreds of likes and follows, and I’ve just had my 1000th view and am struggling with 10 followers…
        But thanks for the advice:)

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        • Whatever I have learnt has been by exploring the WP interface, WP’s help pages and studying other blogs. 🙂 To make separate menus you could add pages, and include links to your posts as its content. The pages could be named as per your blog content themes. The follow button is available under widgets (under the appearance tab). Lastly, just a suggestion, maybe you’d like to change your tag line to something more specific which tell your readers at first glance what your blog is all about. Hope this is helpful. Good luck!

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  8. Pingback: when a blog comes of age — rama arya’s blog — Название сайта

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