Other People's Kids

A Word on Blogging and an Administrative Note

My previous blogging life was in that nastiest of nasty genres: politics. I have my own very strongly and honestly held political beliefs...and I've made it a point to make a sincere effort to keep them to myself within this space.

This space is for content about fostering activities with intermixed inanities about my personal life, not about flaming people of other political persuasions. One of the big things about political blogging is an activity known to political bloggers (and others) as "link-whoring". That is, to do whatever you can to get links to your blog.

It's a fine thing to get your blog linked in a post by one of the biggies in that world...the holy grail in my circles being to get an "instalanche", the term for what happens to your server when you get a link from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, the so-called blogfather. I never got one, but I wanted one.

The finer thing was to get a permanent link to your blog in the sidebar in one of the bigger/more respected blogs. I did manage one of those, and my now-dormant-for-months pol blog STILL gets hits from that link.

This blog was a purposefully taken new direction for me. I'm done with the nastiness and crassness (of which I'm not innocent myself by any stretch), preferring now to focus on things more real, if not always nicer. Hyperbole will be used here, but it will be clearly meant and hopefully understood as such.

Now finally to the point: I meant at the beginning to make this blog a mostly self-referential device. It was going to be an instrospective piece of myself...and it has been. I've been completely open here. Not much of my life is kept out of this account of it, and I plan on continuing that spirit going forward.

I have, however, taken some notice of a few other people out there that do what we do. They are fighting the good fight, keeping the faith, and a bunch of other bad cliches. They deserve some notice, so I've given in and begun a small blogroll on the right under "Fellow Travellers".

I'm only including blogs about fostering (though there are other fine blogs, a few of whom have noticed my humble efforts and kindly linked), and it's not a comprehensive list of all the blogs I've looked at on the subject...but the ones included seem to me to truly be fellow travellers.

These people love kids, they have the same types of struggles and triumphs as we do, and I feel a kinship with them. Give them a look and see if you don't see what I mean. Keep checking the list, as there are a couple more I plan on adding in coming days.

posted by Dan @ 8:40 PM