New Year: new name

As the end of the year approaches I like to take the time to reflect and review all the various aspects of my life, and my blog is no exception. It’s just over a year since I started this personal blog and I’ve managed 47 so far posts, not quite the one per week target I was aiming for. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to keep up the blogging momentum and it has waxed and waned over the course of the year. I originally started the blog to, well basically, learn how to blog. Although I was quite competent using certain areas of the internet: email, research, word processing, etc. until relatively recently social media had largely passed me by and I had no idea how to build a blog or website.

I’ve followed many blogs over the years and always harboured a secret desire to make my random ramblings public. I wanted to add a blog to my business website, but I wondered whether I would be able to maintain the discipline of producing 500 words every week. It’s one thing editing and proofreading other people’s writing, it’s another having to produce the writing yourself. If I was successful I might even be able to branch out into copywriting. But, I had no idea how to construct a blog. My initial attempt at building a business website on Weebly ended in frustration and failure. I ended up hiring a professional website builder to do the job for me. This was, in fact, a good decision and one I repeated again recently when I wanted to rebrand the business and migrate to Wordpress.

I decided to have a go at building a blog using the Google-based Blogger. By this time I already had a Google account with both a Google personal profile and a business page. Creating the blog was simple. I quickly got to grips with dragging and dropping to arrange the sections of text and photographs and experimented with different standard layouts and colour schemes. The next challenge was to find something to blog about and give the blog a name. At the time I was engrossed in Project 333. I was using this wardrobe reduction challenge to bring some order to the huge amount of unsuitable clothes that I had amassed and brought to France.

I have to confess that I was never very keen on the original name I gave the blog [Totally Technical Clothes]. To be honest I was a bit embarrassed by it. That didn’t really matter as initially I had no intention of making the blog public. However, like every budding author, soon the temptation of seeing my words in virtual print was too great and I decided to allow my ramblings free rein in the blogosphere. But I still didn’t really like the name.

As 2015 sped by I made great inroads into the clothing hoard. I recycled all the unsuitable items, achieved my goals and reached a technical clothing equilibrium. Once I’d met my targets I started to look around for other areas of my life where the principles of Project 333 could be applied. That’s where I’m at now – Project 333 in the (vegetarian) kitchen. There are lots of things that I want to write about because I have found, like many people,  that I love writing. I want to record the challenge of becoming vegetarian in France, our campervan exploits and my further attempts to get rid of redundant, surplus ‘stuff’.

Bit of an orange theme...diaries and notebook!

 

I’ve recently rebranded my editing business to better reflect its direction, so it seemed to be appropriate to follow suit with my personal blog. Perhaps if I gave it a new name I would feel more confident about promotion. Problem – choosing a name. It was difficult to find the right words that encompass all my current interests: France, languages, vegetarianism, campervan travel, and of course minimalism and Project 333. My mind was a complete blank and then the answer came to me suddenly whilst out on a walk: My Little Orange Notebook. It reflects my favourite colour (though I would never actually wear it!), it’s the colour of my favourite notebook where I draft posts and record thoughts for both my blogs, plus it’s the national colour of our favourite country, the Netherlands.