A Very Online Life

I've started working on a task I've had on my to-do list for months: updating mariwalker.com. I want to have links there to all my work -- the articles and blog posts from BR Parents and past blog posts that have been published (anywhere but here basically). I want a place to easily find them (and still link to the actual sites where the full articles and posts live). And it would be a nice portfolio of sorts.

I wrote a few blog posts for Woman's Hospital during and after my second pregnancy. They have since moved to a different blog, and not all of them have my by-line. I've figured out which ones I wrote though (I have the emails I sent to the blog editor). That was the first step. I've got draft blog posts linking to each one.

Next step will be making posts for all my BR Parents content -- and there is a lot. Several blog posts but even more articles. On the site my byline search comes up with 45 hits. And that doesn't include the content sections I write (my title is "Section Editor" now), as those aren't online articles but mainly in print with a web layout version also posted (and which I can link to). I've been writing there for more than a year, so it's a lot of posts to create and links to get in order. Then going forward it would be a little easier.

There are other projects and jobs I could write up little summaries of and link to the published bits even without my byline. Will think through those and see what makes sense.

I'm making them all as drafts and back dating them appropriately. Then I'll launch them all at once I guess. I also need a new look to my site. I used to have a WordPress site, but the hosting felt expensive and it is literally a one page site right now. So I switched to Google Domains and used a free blogger blog to become the site itself. I don't like it nearly as much as WordPress for a professional site, but I may be able to use one of the templates to make it a little easier on the eyes and look moderately professional. I want it to go to mariwalker.com rather than redirecting to a page URL that's longer and less clean. But I don't think I'm willing to pay more money and pick up the site and move it back somewhere else. Will keep thinking though. If you want a professional site you have to pay professional money.

I wonder if I should make a professional-ish Twitter account. Not that I say anything problematic, but maybe people wouldn't want to hire or work with me knowing just how liberal I am. Radical even? But only about some things. I also wouldn't want to apologize, so who knows what's good.

I am who I am on Facebook and LinkedIn, although I could look at LinkedIn especially and add info about BR Parents, especially since I have a title. I don't want to lose any momentum I might have toward getting back into the workplace, although the struggle is real.