With a touch of added class! Source.
Welcome to the NEW AND IMPROVED A Thing For Wor(l)ds!!! This is the grown-up version of my modest little site that started 21 months ago as a project to continue writing, a passion that I discovered while blogging during my time studying abroad.
In March of this year I decided I wanted to kick it up a notch. If this was something I loved to do, why not try to make something bigger out of it?
As a total long-shot I applied to the BlogHouse in Chicago, a 4-day hands-on workshop where experts in the travel blogging and social media fields take novice bloggers under their wings and show them the ropes of the business. At the time of my application I had 18 Twitter followers and a whole lot of self-doubt. There was no way they would even look at my statement of purpose—more likely my application would automatically land in their spam file.
About two weeks later I got an email saying that I had been accepted. Don’t know how. Don’t know why. I may have cried a few nerdy blogger tears. The 13 or so other bloggers accepted seem to have hundreds of times as many readers and social media followers; years more experience in the travel blogging field; and knowledge of how to use a computer for anything more than word processing. I am ecstatic to join them in Chicago in June. I am also scared shitless.
But to begin to conquer my fears, and to prove to myself that I can jump into a technological age consisting of more than walkmans and palm pilots, I purchased my own domain name and am now self-hosting my site. I AM STILL VERY MUCH IN THE DARK. I mentioned I started this in March, and it’s now May. . . . two months of internet forums and Youtube self-help videos have made me want to stab my own eyes out, and this BlogHouse Chicago training course couldn’t come soon enough. But my hope is that my little underdog of a language and travel blog will start to grow, if I one day figure out what the acronym SEO means.
If you were following my old WordPress site, I kindly ask you to sign up to follow this one. I kid you not when I say that I spent 4 weeks on internet forums trying to adjust my title size, so do you really think I know enough to automatically transfer all my subscribers? Ha. (And if you weren’t following my old one, I kindly ask you why the hell not?) Any feedback you may have on layout or technology in general is more than appreciated, and please be patient with any kinks that you may experience here.
THANK YOU FOR READING!
A Thing For Wor(l)ds is on the rise. Don’t miss a minute of it! Become my 34th Twitter follower and my 1 billionth Facebook fan. And make sure to sign up to receive emails of new posts—there’s a convenient button on the right sidebar calling your name.
About The Author
Jenny
Jenny Marshall studied Language, Culture, and Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, and now teaches English in Spain. Here she writes about the intersection of language and culture, and lives a life translated by travel.
