Welcome to the Journey

I am about to take you on a journey.

I don't know how long it will take us to get there, or what we will see along the way, or even whether the final destination will turn out to be where I think it is going to be. But I can tell you one thing: it will be fun, informative and life-changing.

Although I have been blogging since 2005, this is the first time I am really putting it out there, casting my net beyond the calm waters of friends and family. The aim of this blog is to document my journey from a full-time employee, via a slight detour on maternity leave, to a part-time freelancer and mother.

There are many reasons for my decision to go on this journey, most notably that my current occupation no longer fits into the lifestyle that accompanies my new role as mother of a one year old. I am lucky to have discovered what my passions and interests are and be in a position whereby I can finally pursue them.

So what exactly will this blog be about?

According to Penelope Trump,

A blog is a great way to figure out what you want to do with yourself because writing regularly is a path to self-discovery.

That is exactly the point of this blog. It's a journey of self-discovery for me, and hopefully for my readers. As such, I can't say exactly what this blog will be about but I can tell you what my passions and interests are.

From a professional perspective I have over a decade's experience as a web developer and business systems analyst. I am passionate about producing simple, usable websites, with structure, presentation and content separated from one another, written in mark-up and code as pure as the driven snow. I am one of those geeky people who became incredibly excited a few years ago by the Web 2.0 evolution (although I still think it's a stupid name). I spend a lot of time reading blogs and I love writing, which I do both for work and, in my spare time for enjoyment. I have had a lot of experience working closely with marketing teams to improve usability, acessibility and search engine rankings of websites. I put all of these things together and realised I had a set of skills and passions perfect for web marketing: development, copy writing and search engine optimisation. I have never worked for myself before and I will probably make mistakes and learn some valuable lessons along the way.

That is the essence of what I think this blog will be about.

On a more personal level, I have enjoyed every moment of being a parent and love finding the humour in every day situations and then writing about it. I hope to get something published one day soon but until then I will keep up my blog about my little Miss Chief and no doubt blog about my efforts to get published on this site. (Please note, I haven't provided a link here for the sake of my daughter's privacy.) Away from the family my interests lie in the environment, climate change, evolution and atheism. I'm not sure to what extent these topics will be blogged about here. I suppose that depends upon whether I use this blog to showcase my talents as a writer.

I have added a blog roll to this blog, consisting of both technical/professional blogs and my more personal interests and no doubt there's a future post in highlighting some of my favourites. I intend to be much more active within the blogging community than I have been before, commenting on, and providing links to other blogs, and hopefully receiving my own trackbacks courtesy of other bloggers.

I have also added Google AdSense to this blog, which is something I've never done before so we'll see where that takes me. I intend to provide useful tagging on a limited number of relevant topics and I invite comments and feedback on all of my posts.

So now all I have to do is get the blog out there and noticed and commence my journey.