Uncovering a lost blog

Inspired by the late Andrew Reeves, who sadly died suddenly last week, I am reviving my blog.

I briefly wrote a blog during and about my time in New York last summer, but this blog was limited to information about that trip. However, over the last week I have been touched and moved by reading the many blog posts about Andrew and his impact on other people's lives. I also frequently have an idea for a personal blog post, but don't usually take it further than jotting down the idea in the "Notes" application on my iPhone. This is mainly because I spend my working day on my laptop and suffer from repetitive strain injury in my right hand (gained from working long hours writing Work Programme bids over the Christmas period) so spending more time in the evening typing is not always an appealing thought.

So today I sat down and decided it had to be done. I briefly thought about whether to use Wordpress or Posterous, but decided to stick with blogger.com as I like the simplicity and contrast with Wordpress which I use at work (and Andrew used blogger.com too).  Then I came to choose a name for the blog and found that lucywatt.blogspot.com was gone already! I felt as annoyed as I had when finding out that @lucywatt was already taken on Twitter (I'm @lucy_watt) - there can't be another me! I decided to look at the blog to see what she had been writing about and discovered that this blog had, in fact, been started by me back in 2005 - in my pre-Facebook days as a way to share (very poor quality) photographs that I had taken on my mobile phones of the 2005 elections, and after that of my holiday to Naples and Ischia (unexpectedly travelling on my own as my travelling companion had lost his passport). Looking back at them, I seem to recall that in those old days we had to use a separate site (Hello?) to load the photographs to the blog.

Whilst initially embarrassed at the poor use of the blog, it made me realise how much things have changed in the last six years. Social media is now an integral part of all of our lives. I found out about Andrew's death from a post on my friend's Facebook page. Over the last week, many memories of Andrew were shared on Facebook and Twitter. Andrew's online presence had brought him closer to many of us who read his blog, Twitter and Facebook posts on a regular basis.  On the day of his death he was even trending on Twitter in the UK, a real testament to the esteem he was held in by online community.

So I now hope that this blog is something that I can make better use of. Reading through my list of blog ideas, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.