Reviewing Random Blogs

Since I’m in the process of returning my blog here to its former glory, I’ve been noodling around looking for other bloggers that are still busy in the grand Blogspot universe. My bloglist is full of old, abandoned blogs and a few that are too polished - the types that got a bit too much like glossy magazine editorials in the end, ones that appear to have totally lost the sense of personal documentation that I always loved so much. But it’s mostly the graves. Dead links where bloggers have let their domain names lapse are the most spooky of all. Not even a frame, no ruined archway to look through. No faded tombstone lettering, just dull yellow grass, starved.

A photo by CJ from Above the River.

So I’ve been looking at the only thing I can find that’s still going. And I have located the world of the older lady. Come with me on my journey through the random blogs of women. I will review them now. What fun we shall have.

First up is Grandma Becky L. I found her blog through the comments on a lengthy Attic24 post. 

This blog, by the way, was mentioned by a commenter recently when I asked what blogs they were still reading. And I love the look of it. The two sidebars filled with links, recent posts, and a blog award banner. Sort of quaint, and a perfect place for a long post filled with nature pics collected throughout June with text on the joys of having a nice summer and looking at some flowers and trees. Very true.

Anyway, back to Grandma Becky. My new queen.

Grandma Becky has an amazing, old school blog layout, featuring a translucent sidebar with a Blogger followers list that has long been abandoned by most blogs that made it past 2013. One thing that struck me was her background, an image of red, blue, and yellow paint (or ink) mixing together in a chaotic drip pattern. A perfect image. Formless, could be made by anyone. That’s what blogging is all about baby!

I also noticed some iconic images in her sidebar. One photo labelled “Girlfriend Fun”, and one labelled “Phil and Becky”.

That’s the kind of cute, understated, personal stuff that reminds me how special and sweet these spaces are. Good for you, Phil and Becky. I love you. I love your love.

Grandma Becky’s posts themselves are pretty straightforward logs of things she’s been doing throughout the day. Here’s some lavender I saw while I was out meeting a friend. Here’s a tea I had. Here are some socks I washed. It rained today. 

At the bottom of the page there’s a picture of “Airman Becky”. Her life is here and I’m taking a little look.

Another blog I found is called “Above the River”. This one is by CJ, a (younger) South Gloucestershire woman who has the stylistic habit of placing all of her photos at the beginning of her blog posts, with captions and commentary following. She too posts a lot of natural photos she takes, and it’s nice browsing them, textless, as if I was watching the landscape unfold in small, sweet pieces around me. These posts feel like letters from a family member, the images enclosed, but separate. It’s super interesting to me how the ordering of the two elements really impacts the feel of reading. There is an intimacy here in the slight rejection of what I think of as typical blogging convention.

The third blog I’ll talk about is “Mrs Ford’s Diary”. Now, this one hasn’t been updated since 2019, so it’s not really a blog that’s still going, but I thought it was interesting in its simplicity. The posts are short, text-only, and written in an almost pronoun-less shorthand. They convey a lot of information very quickly, and so the condensed life of the person writing is packaged into a beautiful little curio. This is quite different to a lot of blogging I’ve seen, and there is something immediately compelling about it. She has a wry way of writing. Come back, Mrs Ford, please. We need you.

After looking at some of these blogs, clicking on blogrolls and following various strange and mysterious links to strange and mysterious places, I remembered the existence of the Blogger profile, and looked at mine. Profiles are everywhere, or course, but something about seeing this one again made me think, “hmm, yeah… this is who I am”. Such a neat place to put myself, like a little white stone shrine statue.

Here I am!

And I’m here like these women, and every day could be extrapolated into a long letter to an invisible daughter. I too could have “Girlfriend Fun” on the sidebar. What a glorious opportunity. Perhaps I will.