On the state of blogging, Yuma CO and life in the Manor

On blogging comebacks

My front porch with wild flowers, last summer at the Manor

On a misleadingly positive note, 2020 blogging output on Reflections is double 2019's. That is to say, I posted once in 2019 and, until just now, twice this year, neither original posts but content from elsewhere. This post will triple it. 

Why the silence? It's complicated. What, if anything, does Yuma and the Manor have to do it? Possibly nothing but bear thinking about. I suspect it's voice, personal vs neutral. Will the comeback stick this time? Who knows? My comeback record so far is not encouraging, but I'm game to give it another shot. 

Considering Yuma and the Manor

Briefly recapping: in the summer of 2015, I moved to Yuma from Mountainair NM after fifteen and a half years there. Compared to Mountainair, Yuma is larger, has more amenities and resources. Both are small, relatively isolated, rural western communities. Windmills and the railroads are iconic and historically significant to both; demographics and topography, in clear contrast. As Rural Indivisibles explain, the issues and concerns are the same across rural communities: individually, each is different, never "see one, seen them all."

I blogged the move (here and here) and settled into Yuma public housing, aka High Plains Manor usually just "the Manor." After several months in, "Life in the Manor and points west" emerged on Facebook where it was met with suspicion and disdain, with one resident informing me that "people our age don't use Facebook and aren't interested" in going online. An unnamed handful complained to management about "being confused" about whether it was an official Manor page. apparently expecting I would be told to take it down. Instead. I pinned a post to the top of the explaining what the page was and was not.  Since then I have maintained a community calendar and make an effort to post community and resident relevant content. Like Mountainair Online, it is a personal community page, which imo has certain responsibility to the community that is the presumptive audience

By now I'm somewhat less of an outsider. Considering small town dynamics, I expect the basic classification to persist. Even so it's time (long overdue) for the page to take a turn to the more personal.  I'm now a page admin on two other local Facebook pages, more involved with YuCo & friends than the other I just contribute to. Both are also community pages but with more emphasis on area news, rural issues and politics. 

The meta view from my porch while updating the Manor page

What do Facebook pages have to do with blogging?

Short version: the connection is content, its management (creation, creation) and distribution.  Think of blogs, web pages and social media platforms as part of the digital information supply chain. Changes in social media and, in this case, Facebook policies designed  and tweaked over time to keep readers on platform have changed how the supply chain works, especially for those of us operating on a shoestring. My blogs and other rss sources fed different Facebook pages set to auto-tweet posts to difference Twitter streams. Back in the day, bloggers started Facebook pages to promote their blogs. At some point the pages took over and eclipsed or replaced blogs. Of course, there's more, but this suffices for now

Next post

... more reflections and a guided tour of blog features