Who Even Reads Blogs Anymore?

Do you guys remember when blogs were, like, the whole world? I'm talking early 2000s to maybe about 2010-2011. I'd wake each morning and eagerly open my Google Reader to see who posted what, often reading for an hour or more before I officially started my day. Slowly, life started to take over. The hours I used to read became skimming or short bursts of catching up. And in more recent years, Instagram has almost completely taken over reading. I'll scroll through pretty pictures while nursing. And my new favorite activity is watching Instastories.

I'm losing steam when it comes to blogging. There are many reasons.

• I don't feel I have as much to say as I once did. I used to take on a much more expert opinion on matters. In my ripe old age of 33, I don't necessarily feel like I have much figured out anymore. Or at least I've learned to put my foot in my mouth whenever I think I finally have figured out everything. Because, ultimately, there are many ways to do things. All things.
• I don't have as much time anymore. Practically, I have to spend time where the money is, and that's freelancing for me. I make a modest living pecking out articles on medical matters. It feels much more stable than trying to hedge my bets on blogging as my main source of income. Unless you're part of a select few, blogging money isn't what it used to be. And I'm unwilling to submit myself to the sellout gods. I've experimented with sponsored stuff in the past . . . and I'm not saying I'll never take on sponsored posts again, but it's a delicate balance. Most people don't do it well.
• People just aren't reading as much anymore. I have a good number of devoted readers, and I love you guys. But it's hard to pour energy and thought into something when it just isn't reaching many people for whatever reason. There have always been hits or misses, but lately it's more misses. 
• And I think that has to do with stage of life. When I was in my twenties, I had all the time in the world to think about my fitness, eating, and personal stuff. Everything about adulting was so fresh and new and exciting. The sorts of people who are attracted to this space seem to care mostly about my journaling. My personal thoughts versus recipes, tutorials, or anything else. We know that planning the perfect birth/wedding/fitness plan/outfit isn't always feasible. That doesn't mean we don't try . . . but we'd rather read deeply personal accounts of life so we don't feel so alone. At least that's me.
• But as I've written in the past (almost a year ago, in fact), I'm conflicted about sharing too much. Because sometimes someone random will take your photos and pretend your children are actually her children. For years. You know, weird stuff like that -- and no, I don't feel like going into detail!

I don't necessarily think I'm done blogging full stop, but I may approach it in a new way. I may go down to posting just once a week with words. Once a week with photos. Something personal. Something of quality. Something that means something . . . rather than churning water trying to get the number of posts up.

And as I typed that sentence -- not meaning to be done with you guys just yet -- my teething 11-month-old baby is waking from her fitful nap. No, I don't like to blame the children. But when you deal with early wakeups, skipped naps, and overall crank for days weeks on end . . . running to the computer to come up with content isn't really what you want to do straight away. You sort of just want to stare at the wall for a minute, take a deep breath, and keep on keeping on. Or call a friend. Or your parents. Or do 10 minutes of Barre3.

I suppose I'll return with a part II. For now, I'm going to grab that apple ice teether out of the freezer and hope to goodness it does its magic.

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Oh, Blogging. You're So Complicated.

Hey, everyone! Happy Friday! I just wanted to hop on quickly to let you all know that we love you so much, we sacrificed like CRAZY for you. In fact, I'd describe this week as our best week with comments. EVER. Simply put: We love, love, love reading what you have to say . . . but we've had SO much trouble responding in a good way. Blogger's comments have no tool in place to respond individually, no way to really manage things well (SPAM, which we've been getting like woah this week), etc.

So, at the advice of many other frustrated Blogger bloggers, we switched over to Disqus. Chrissy (The New Me) has been particularly helpful with the implementation, but she warned me that making the switch will likely delete all existing comments.

Yup! That's exactly what happened.

There's an import function . . . and I'll be working tirelessly over the weekend to try and get it working. (So far, no luck!) If it comes to it, I may switch back -- which should restore everything. At least I hope.

In the meantime, please show us some love. We feel . . . lonely now. Test out the new comments function. Please tell us if you like it. And hopefully in no time at all, we'll get your thoughtful words and awesome additions back.

<3

OK. UPDATE: Just as I posted this . . . the import function kicked in! Sooooo. Thanks for sharing in our little freak-out moment. I swear to you, I almost cried. All comments have been restored. We HEART Disqus. We thank Chrissy for her help. And we encourage you to test out the new function. Now we can give back to all of you who give us so many reasons to smile each day!

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(never home)maker: You Have SO Many Looks!

That's right! We changed the site design . . . again. We promise to not make a regular habit of it. But this time, we were on a mission. We overhauled the entire layout, too. It's not just for looks, people. The results of our survey revealed that many of you thought the old navigation was OK. However, many others thought we could use a bit of TLC in the area.

You're smart. And we wholeheartedly agreed with your comments.

So, we've moved from a two column layout to a three column one. Mostly, it's because we want to create better ways to find our posts (as you'll notice, this part is still in the works). We hope to get it all looking far less busy than it did on the previous iteration.

BEFORE:


NOW:


Now, I know you're wondering about the colors. The new scheme is perhaps a symptom of the season. It's cold and grey outside today. The bright colors just didn't reflect what's going on right now. Plus, I had the opportunity to shoot some photos this morning and create a new header. (Those lights from our DIY lightbox really came in handy!) The result was a cool-toned picture that didn't exactly jive with a bold background.

The photoshoot? It was a disaster if we're being entirely honest.


But most of the clutter and filth (no, we have yet to purchase our mini dishwasher) was out of frame.

See?


Lots of props to play with. And after just a couple shots (I took only 20!), I settled on one I liked. Though, there was a close second. Unfortunately, it didn't reflect the whole fitness aspect of our site.

Here she is:


After adding some contrast and adjusting shadows, the header was complete. The next part went pretty quickly. I'd had the template picked out for a couple of weeks . . . just needed the courage to make the switch. Thankfully, it was relatively painless. And I'm pretty sure I like it. Takes some getting used to, but there's a lot more flexibility.

(Here's a trick for not-so savvy bloggers -- like me! -- out there. If you can -- set up a test site that mimics your "real" site. And just make sure you test everything before going live and changing the live page.)

So, that's the story of why we're looking quite different today than we did yesterday. We invite all you RSS followers to click through to neverhomemaker.com and check it out. Let us know what you think and if you have suggestions (Just leave a comment or email us at neverhomemaker [at] gmail [dot] com).


Obviously, we're listening . . . or I wouldn't have risked it all, gained a few grey hairs, and slightly freaked out during my morning break today. Let's just take a moment to look at the image above.

We've definitely come a long way in just over a year! Woah!!!

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to know what the (never home)makers are up to. And we’ll love you forever!

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Weekend Happenings: T-Giving Edition

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend! I'm thankful for my break from work and blogging . . . which gave me more time to spend with family and friends. Though, I now feel somewhat exhausted from driving from place to place. It's one of those "I need a vacation from my vacation" kind of feelings. Hopefully December will go relatively fast -- I can't wait till my next big sweep of time off.

Wednesday I went to my first-ever physical therapy appointment. (You may remember that I learned little last week from my orthopedist about what's wrong with my knee.) What my PT told me wasn't incredibly shocking. My IT band is tight. My muscles in my left leg aren't as strong (but also no so terribly different) as in my right leg. Doesn't necessarily explain the sharp kneecap pain . . . that's still puzzling everyone . . . but it all likely started with my SI joint (in my back). No the piriformis muscle, as I had thought.


I'm doing stretches and strengthening exercises . . . and over the weekend I seem to have dropped the sharp kneecap pain. Now, I'm feeling the classic outside-of-the-knee-where-the-IT-band-connects pain. I have two appointments this week. So, we'll see! I'm also rolling with "The Stick" and thinking about trying the KT tape again. Overall, I'm hoping it's the IT band because that's a much better issue to deal with than cartilage or some other injuries.

Thanksgiving Day (Thursday) we visited my family in Pennsylvania. The weather was somewhat terrible driving down (ice and snow), but we made it on time . . . with some tasty cookies and chili.


The chili was a variation on our favorite smoked pumpkin kind we love so much. We didn't have any pumpkin puree (I blame the chocolate pumpkin pies for that!), so we thought maybe beets would work. The reviews were mixed, but I'm not a fan. Stick with the pumpkin, and you'll love that recipe.

The cookies? A Double-Chocolate Scottish Oatmeal Chipper. Recipe will be posted later in the week!


Friday we set out on an epic cleaning mission. I have so many clothes . . . so I took ALL of them and dumped them in the spare bedroom. Stephen helped, but I went through each and every single piece of my clothing and decided if it was a KEEP, TOSS, MAYBE, or SELL/DONATE.

In all, we now have two huge garbage bags stuffed with stuff to donate or sell. As well, we have an entire bag of shoes! Woah. More on this later in the week.


Saturday I drove to Ithaca to meet up with Julie (Savvy Eats) and Heather (Then Heather Said). These girls are so nice! The minute I got there, they told me they wanted to hit up my favorite Thai restaurant for lunch!

We ate great food and chatted about blogging (particularly how clueless I am with all the technical stuff).




We shopped at all kinds of awesome thrift spots!



My favorite finds:


We rounded out the visit with a trip to GreenStar, the natural foods coop. I bought dry roasted peanuts and cashews and made nut butters. I bought rice marshmallows and made peanut butter rice treats. I bought two bags of my favorite ready-in-5-seconds cookie dough.



Sunday I was in such a great mood after my visit with these ladies (and trip to my old stomping grounds). I decided to create one of my favorite college meals: DP Dough. For those of you who aren't familiar, DP Dough is a chain of calzone take-out joints. I believe their tagline is something like: "The pizza alternative." Let's just say, their calzones are WAY better than pizza. They're also WAY high in calories and WAY low in nutritional value.

I ate many my freshman year of college. In fact, I think DP Dough was the first place I drove to off campus. Anyway, making them at home, I was able to control the calories (my variety was just over 700 versus what I think is more like 1,200 for the original). And here's the cool thing . . . mine tasted pretty much identical!


So, that's the holiday weekend rundown. What have you been up to? Please note that all the food in this post (well, that I've made -- not the Thai) will be covered later in the week. (Do you see anything you'd like posted sooner rather than later?)

Though we very much enjoyed our Thanksgiving meal at home with family . . . we are looking forward to next weekend. We've decided to go crazy with decorating the exterior and interior of our house. And we'll need food to keep us going.

We need your help: WHAT should we make? So far, we're thinking some purple potatoes mashed with coconut milk, some cranberry-glazed tempeh, and stuffing. But we'd love suggestions! Give us a link to your favorite holiday foods!

Just leave a comment or email us at neverhomemaker [at] gmail [dot] com.

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to know what the (never home)makers are up to. And we’ll love you forever!

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Recipes We're Lusting Over

Finally Friday! We hope all of you are having a great pre-weekend day. (And those of you at the Healthy Living Summit look like you're having a great time in Chicago -- we're super jealous!) Our weekend plans aren't big. Grocery shopping. Reading. Dying hair (well, I'm doing that). Running 20-milers on Sunday (yikes!). You know. The usual.

We hope you've enjoyed our Healthy Living Celebration this week. We still have more stories to share. For now, though, we have pulled together all the latest on one handy-dandy page. There are also instructions on how you can submit your own story to us.

Just click this image on the right sidebar:


We consider (never home)maker to be about 50 percent food blog. We take great care in creating some tasty recipes to share with you all. But we don't live in a bubble. In fact, we're always trolling the internet for foodie inspiration. Here are some of the recipes we're drooling over right now. And as soon as we get some more time in the kitchen, these will be the first foods we try to replicate.

(All images below belong to their respective blog owners -- we included them to entice you to visit their sites!)

101 Cookbooks

There's something completely irresistible about this Lasagna Tart. I simply can't pass on gorgeous Italian food. And I'm always looking for ways to use my tart pan.


Edible Perspective

Leave it to Ashley to come up with an amazing combination like Curry Honey Hummus. She's so creative -- and her photos of this dish are enough to make you drool on your keyboard.


Honey & Jam

I'm a sucker for an awesome chocolate cake recipe. This one isn't your typical take either -- it has a secret ingredient (in the cake AND frosting) for some extra punch.


Kiss My Spatula

How cool is this? Instructions on how to make your own mozzarella cheese. That's right -- make your own CHEESE. Complete with tasty photos.


Food Loves Writing

I've been a fan of Shannalee for a while now. Her combination of basil, peach, and cheese . . . grilled on sourdough. Heaven! Check out this new version of an old favorite (grilled cheese) as soon as you can. You still have time to pick up the ingredients tonight and make it for dinner!


Oh She Glows

Angela is always coming up with the best healthy desserts. She pushes the envelope . . . and I love seeing the new recipes she creates. These raw Cookie Dough Balls are no exception. Yum!


Kohler Created

By now, I think you know about our love of all things chocolate and peanut butter. So, when I saw these Reece's Pieces Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies, I just about screamed with joy. Yeah. maybe candy isn't the healthiest thing ever -- but who says health bloggers have to "behave" at all times?

What are YOU cooking up this weekend? Have any big plans? Going to be bums like us? Let us know! Just leave a comment or email us at neverhomemaker [at] gmail [dot] com.

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to know what the (never home)makers are up to. And we’ll love you forever!!

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