Blog Review: Blogging Without A Blog

Reading blogs on the internet is a lot like panning for gold. You have to sift through a lot of grit and sand to find the good stuff. If you don’t give up, you’ll find a lot of gold flakes that make the search worthwhile. Every once in a while, you get lucky and find a gold nugget.

Blogging Without A Blog is one of those gold nuggets.

The blog is written by Barbara Swafford. She describes herself as a wife, mother and grandmother who created the blog as a place to record the lessons she’s learned from blogging. In the process, she has built so much more. She has created a community of wonderful people who come there, not only to learn from Barbara, but to share their own thoughts and lives as well.

Although I recognize the WordPress theme used for the design, it is a perfect fit for her site. It flows well and is laid out to make it easy to find whatever you are searching for. Anything not found on the front page can be found by using the search bar on the pen in the upper right corner or via the links along the top of the page.

Best of all is the content. Barbara’s posts are both informative and thought-provoking. They are well written and posted often enough to keep you coming back for more yet far enough apart to give you time to think about and respond to each one. The “assignments” at the end of each post encourage her readers to do just that. I have yet to find a post that wasn’t followed by a lively discussion between Barbara and her followers, all of them insightful and informative on their own. It is obvious that Barbara cares about each of the visitors to her blog.

I was somewhat disappointed to find it no longer possible to post your blog to her blog registry, since the comments section for posting has been closed. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve found just as many wonderful blogs from links in the comments as I would have by looking in the directory, maybe even more so. Reading the comments allows me to see the writer’s personality, peaking my curiosity, much more than a simple directory listing would.

Thanks to Barbara’s wonderful site, I’ve found many wonderful blogs to read. Now if I can only find the time to read them all!