(This is my thirty-first and final post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026, but that doesn’t mean I’m done.)
The Why
I did Blaugust this year on a whim.
No, that’s not entirely true. I did it to procrastinate other tasks on my to-do list, and to get myself back into blogging after a very significant break. My brain needed some kind of goal to focus on in order to get past that “I can always start tomorrow” wall.
But also on a whim.
But also because a friend of mine who liked participating in Blaugust wasn’t able to this year because of health reasons.
And also another person who I’d have liked to call a friend (a few conversations on Mastodon is not enough to reach that point) isn’t around any more to lead us through Blaugust.
The Past
I started this blog on January 25th, 2005 as a project for a grad school course. The final project for the class had to be a website, but I’d already been doing HTML coding for 9 years at that point and, while I was no expert, I was further along than what was expected by the curriculum.
So I made a blog instead of hand-coding a static website with an image and a handful of links. If I remember correctly, it was originally hosted on a .Mac or Geocities account (I can’t remember which, both are long gone, now) and built using Thingamablog, which ran on a Mac but output the entire blog as static pages you could then upload somewhere without needing PHP or mySQL support.
At that point getting everything to look the way I want was way more of a challenge than what was expected, but I wanted to get something out of the class. Oddly enough, Mark Harden (whose “Artchive” was featured in that inaugural post) was eventually one of my grad school professors.
Unless I’m remembering this wrong. It was 20+ years ago, after all.
Less than 4 months later, I was podcasting.
By December 2005 I was part of the Discovery Educator Network, which was always meant to be a way to encourage teachers to advertise Discovery Education’s streaming service for free, but back then they were in the “spend lots of money and just encourage people to make cool things” stage so a young(er) and naive me didn’t catch on.
Throughout that journey I never stopped blogging and podcasting, up until 2008 when I got a job offer for my current building. I’d no longer be a traveling art teacher, or even an art teacher (by strict job description definition), but instead I’d be teaching technology to K-8 students.
I leapt on the opportunity immediately.
Since then my job description has changed. I’m back in the Creative Arts department because that’s what video production, photography, graphic design, and podcasting all are. I’m having a ton of fun, and I’ve also been very, very busy.
So busy that I stopped podcasting and blogging.
Oh, I’d pop in from time to time with an update. Maybe I’d post the slides and/or recording of my conference presentation from that year. It wasn’t the same, though. What had been a place for me to excitedly share things or angrily rant about them had become a place where I stored stuff.
A lot happened. I figured out what the Discovery Educator Network was and jumped out of the boiling pot. I started (and ended) other podcast projects. I restarted my podcast here, then ended it again mid-recording when I realized it wasn’t a fun thing so much as a chore I was forcing myself to complete.
My wife died.
I started another podcast with a group of friends, unrelated to anything I put here. It’s been going strong for over 9 years, now, updating twice a week.
But it’s not about what I do for a living.
My current school district is very big on goal setting. I set goals for my students based on collected data, then check to see if they met those goals. I set a goal for myself, then do the same. My yearly evaluation partly depends on these.
Last year, my goal was “Move Slow and Fix Things.” I didn’t start any brand new initiatives, I just went through and revised any of the older things that needed updating or, well, fixing. Not to brag, but in the process all of my students met the goals I set for them and I earned the highest evaluation rating possible.
The Future (…we got here eventually.)
Last year I was looking internally, at what we had in the building and what needed revisions.
This year, I’m looking outward.
You may have noticed (or not, I don’t check site analytics) that most things I wrote for this year’s Blaugust were reactions to other things I saw online. Usually news articles. Occasionally a video, for flavor.
This was a self-imposed limitation, along with the daily posting. Neither was required for Blaugust, which in fact has very few rules about how to do it beyond not copy/pasting an AI output and calling it a day.
My purpose for this blog’s revival is to force me to look for things that relate in some way to what I do for a living and archive my reactions to them.
I don’t intend to polish what I write here. I expect typos to get through. I expect meandering train-of-thought old-man-telling-stories-again essays that would make any Language Arts teacher reflexively grab for a red pen.
But I also expect to be more informed about what’s changing in the world around me, so I can bring the good parts into my classroom and preparing my students to endure the bad parts.
For Blaugust, I managed 31 posts in 31 days. There’s no way I’m keeping that up now that the school year’s starting.
But I think I can manage at least one a week. More, if there’s some clouds that need me to yell at them, but let’s set once a week as a minimum.
It’s good to be back.
