Well, we gave ourselves eight weeks and, throughout March and April, intern Nicole Jagielski ‘12 and I have challenged ourselves to get this blog up and running. Nicole took the lead and, in this guest post, she reflects on the steps that took us from there to here.
I began blogging two years ago when I was preparing for several international trips: one, to the Czech Republic and Austria with the SNC wind ensemble, and the other, my study abroad semester to Sydney, Australia. The trips gave me a theme to center my writing around and provided the added bonus of letting people know what I was up to without expensive international calls.
I quickly fell in love with blogging. I appreciate having a way to keep in contact with my extended family and friends, especially during some of the busier times of the semester when I don’t have time to send fifteen individual emails. More importantly, it’s incredibly exciting and gratifying to push the ‘publish’ button and wonder who might stumble across my thoughts.
Since blogging has been such a large part of my life in the past two years, it’s been marvelous to see Susan fall in love with blogging this semester.
It’s taken a lot more thought than I anticipated. As magazine editor, Susan has a much, much larger audience than that of my personal blog, and I’ve found that the larger the audience, the more thought has to go into the creation of the blog to help it service each of the readers. It’s a wonderful problem to have to appeal to a large readership, and that has affected the blog in ways that I never expected. Like its title. The blog is hosted on the college’s professional home pages site and the default title is the staffer’s or professor’s name. So, for a while, the blog was simply called “Susan Allen,” which lends itself well to a personal blog, but not necessarily an editor’s blog. Today, I checked and noticed that Susan had worked out how to customize the header, and the working title is now “Editing Norbertine.” It may seem like a small detail to change the title, but each of these details has an incredible impact on the way readers connect while reading.
This blog has also been a lot more technically challenging than I anticipated. I have a hunch that both Susan’s and mine ability to troubleshoot anything web-related largely relies upon a series of educated guesses about which buttons to click, and a few strokes of luck. Fortunately, Nina’s been a blessing in this process, and tech support is always just a call away.
This blog has taken a lot more planning than I anticipated. I blog whenever the spirit moves me, but an audience like this one demands more. It’s meant a lot of planning what to post and when to post it. We’ve developed sustainable content pieces like “Two Minutes with @St. Norbert” that will run most months of the year, some pieces that run a few times each year, assembled a calendar of posting ideas for each of the next twelve months, and even a bank of possible post ideas.
The process benefitted more than just the editor and the magazine. In fact, working with Susan to develop this blog has improved my blogging skills and habits. I made my blog look more aesthetically pleasing, started tagging each of my posts to create a tag cloud, and have even been posting more frequently.
Most importantly, I’m excited to see a project that I collaborated on continue my influence at St. Norbert College long past my graduation date this May, and I like the idea of leaving a small legacy for future interns to pick up and improve upon.
