blog names and why I'm dumping them (plus a note about my posting schedule at the very end)

I've decided to stop using blog names for my family members. Here you go: PellMel is really Melanie (Mel), MadMax is Sam, and Dean is, and always has been, Doug. You already know that I'm Barb. If you're curious why this is happening, keep reading, but if that's all you need to know, off you go to your next activity.

When I started blogging a dozen years ago, I was freaked out about publicly over-sharing. My first couple of blogs were shrouded in secrecy. Other than Doug, I don't think anyone in my "real" life even knew about my first blog. So I came up with cute blog names for my people to shield them from Internet Notoriety.

But times have changed. For one thing, I don't think any of us believes in the illusion of internet privacy anymore. It would take you two minutes of digging, if you even cared, to find out more about me and my family than I've ever shared in a blog post.

For another thing, my blogs have never generated much traffic. Everyone who blogs both fears and longs for their blog to go viral, but twelve years later (I wrote my first post in October of 2003), that's never happened to me. A couple of posts on my old blog have over a thousand page views, but that's the most traffic I've ever had. Most of my readers (you) are people I actually know, either in real life or because we've met in some internet forum. I think I can stop worrying about exposing my kids to the glare of the paparazzi.

And also, they--my family--don't really care. I'm a privacy freak, but none of them are. Sam, who is a bit on the introverted side, might care if he hadn't grown up in the internet age where everything any of his friends does immediately shows up on Instagram. But Doug and Mel have always thought it was a little odd that I didn't just use our real names. So now I am.

Coincidentally, and a little off topic, just last week I was reading a book (One Plus One by JoJo Moyes) which has a teen character who starts a blog. By and large the book is down-to-earth and relatively realistic (given that it's a fictional work with a plot and a number of common tropes of current fiction), but one thing was absurdly not real. This kid starts a blog, writes a few posts, and without doing any promotion at all--as far as the reader knows, he's never even told anyone he was blogging-- suddenly he has hundreds of readers and dozens of comments.

Right. Not happening. My times of highest reader traffic have all been when I was telling people I had something for them to read. Speaking of, thanks for reading this one.

And while we're discussing blog issues, about my posting schedule: I've been keeping a Tuesday-Friday schedule for awhile now and for the most part that works well for me. But I have a couple of multi-part posts coming up that will be posted all in one week, so there will be some in-between posts, too. Scroll down or check over on the calendar to find anything you might've missed. Thanks.