{"id":2152,"date":"2006-08-27T11:15:10","date_gmt":"2006-08-27T16:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.1.5\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2017-01-28T15:57:31","modified_gmt":"2017-01-28T15:57:31","slug":"old-in-blog-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-essays\/old-in-blog-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Old in Blog Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathy, of Cold Climate Gardening<\/a> begins a series today, an online panel discussion of eight other garden bloggers who have been blogging for four or more years. I’m thrilled to be included. Kathy is putting up one topic a day over the next week or so. Here are the questions she asked with links to the answers. I’ll update the list as she does.<\/p>\n

Part 1. According to their respective websites, Blogger was founded in 1999 and Movable Type in 2001. But as I remember, even when I started my garden blog in 2002, most people didn’t know what a blog was, or see the point of it, really. So what in your background or relationships made you aware of and comfortable with the technology? What led you to become an “early adopter”? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 2. Of all the things you could use this technology for, why gardening? How did you see a blog working for you better than more traditional means of garden communication, such as a chat over the fence, a garden club membership, a plant society membership, or a magazine subscription? What problem were you hoping to solve, or what need did you want to fill? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 3. Did your garden blog accomplish what you were hoping for? Any unexpected benefits? Any disappointments? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 4. What do you think has caused the proliferation of garden blogs in the last year? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 5. Thinking over all of the garden blogging you’ve done and the garden blogs you’ve read since you first started, what has changed for the better? What negatives, if any, have arisen? Do you miss anything from the “good ol’ days” of blogging? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 6. Do you think gardeners comment less than other bloggers? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 7. Does it seem to you that gardeners, as a whole, are late adopters of technology? I mean, look at the categories for the Weblog Awards. There’s a category for best craft blog, best food blog, best entertainment blog, best politics blog, best web development blog, etc. The closest gardeners get is best topical blog, which is basically an “everything else” category. Why do you think this is so? (Or make a case for the opposite\u00c5|that they’re not late adopters.) Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 8. What advice would you give a gardener starting a blog today? Link to discussion.<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 9. What’s next for gardeners interested in internet communication? Today, blogging. Tomorrow? Link to discussion.<\/a>
\n
\nZanthan Gardens: A History<\/strong>
\nIt’s difficult to reconstruct an exact history: I’ve changed computers, lost email, and completely redesigned the site several times.<\/p>\n

2001-09-08.
\nCreated the first Plant Profiles page: Rhodophiala bifida<\/a>. (What else! Oxblood lilies are the mascot of my garden.) The original garden site pages were written in html 4.01 using BBEdit.<\/p>\n

2001-11-30.
\nA few months later, we experimented with Movable Type, and on November 30, 2001 I added a blog page to my garden site. As I have three other blogs and AJM has one, we created the umbrella Zanthan site and thus the garden site name evolved to Zanthan Gardens.<\/p>\n

2001-12-02.
\nJoined Webring’s Texas Gardening ring. Found some garden sites but no other blogs.<\/p>\n

2002-01-01.
\nFirst Google hit on a search for lagerstroemia. (I was pretty excited by this! I’d spent most of the previous month working on my nipponDAZE blog–when I realized people were finding my gardening blog, I realized I needed to get back to work on it.)<\/p>\n

2002-01-22.
\nFirst comment (from someone I know).<\/p>\n

2002-05-23.
\nRedesigned plant profiles to use divs instead of tables.<\/p>\n

2002-07-13.
\nFirst comment from a stranger. (Annie, can you guess what topic this was on? Yep. Indian hawthorn. Still my most commented entry.)<\/p>\n

2003-06-01.
\nI still hadn’t found any garden blogs, but I linked to these garden sites.
\nLost Springs<\/a> in the Texas Hill Country (formerly Spring Holler Ranch).. I’d lost track of this site when they changed their name and URL and just rediscovered them. An excellent, excellent site. I’ll have to update my sidebar now.
\nGarden Bits<\/a> by Valerie in Austin. After finding each other online we got together to visit each other gardens and share plants.
\nHigher Ground<\/a>: the Life and Times of a Southern Garden. (1999-02-11).<\/p>\n

2003-06-23.
\nAn email from a reader points out that it’s not clear that the blog and the static pages belong to the same site. Some of the static pages still emphasize the old name, “A Central Austin Garden”. However, it takes me almost nine months to integrate the site.<\/p>\n

2003-07-14.
\nAnother comment. They were few and far between in these days. This one from someone that I now know in person thanks to our garden blogs, Pam Penick.<\/p>\n

2003-08-12.
\nMigrated plant profiles from html 4.01 to xhtml 1.0 strict and css.<\/p>\n

2004-01-12
\nConverted the In Bloom<\/a> calendars to xhtml 1.0 strict. This was a horrible job because I decided to break up the one unwieldy table into 12 monthly tables. I still hate updating these tables although it’s pretty easy to do in August when nothing is blooming.<\/p>\n

2004-03-17.
\nUpdated style sheets to better integrate the static pages and blog pages.<\/p>\n

2004-04-11.
\nI was discovering more garden sites and, finally, blogs!
\nPrairie Point<\/a> by Bill in the Dallas area. He began blogging in March, 2003.
\nHands in the Dirt<\/a> by Don, a former Austinite now gardening in Indiana.
\nSoul of the Garden<\/a> by one of Austin’s most renowned gardeners, Tom Spencer.
\nSelah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve<\/a>. Not a blog but I was flattered when their web designer asked me for tips on redesigning their site.<\/p>\n

2006-01-21.
\nI’m interviewed about keeping a garden journal<\/a> for our local paper, the Austin American-Statesman.<\/p>\n

2006-04-27.
\nI license blog content to Blogburst and Zanthan Gardens is picked up for syndication by the Austin American-Statesman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.” Baudelaire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5054,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/5054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}