Homeschooling Hearts & Minds is Getting a Major Update!

2022-06-09T21:43:00.000-04:00

They say the internet is forever.

While that's sorta true (take a gander at archive.org if you've ever had a site "go away" on you unexpectedly), things change. People change. Needs change. Aesthetics change. The internet is a very different animal from what it was back in 2008 when I started this site. The internet was still a baby back then. You couldn't subscribe to Amazon to get monthly deliveries of dog food. Facebook didn't exist.

When I created this site, it was meant to keep far-flung family and friends up-to-date with what we were doing. Then I started doing curriculum reviews. And creating free resources for other homeschool families and somewhere along the way, I began to realize that although I was still a tiny blogger (there are no millions of hits going on here), my personal life and my public persona were all mixed up in this blog.

Blog writing is deceptively intimate and private. It feels like you are talking to yourself or just your best friend. Or at least it did back in 2008. But that's a deception. In reality, if you are writing it on the internet, anyone can read it. If you wouldn't share your private diary with the world, then don't share those private thoughts on a blog.

The ubiquitousness of social media and the perpetuity of internet content made it difficult to share my homeschool story while respecting the privacy of my children.

So, in 2018, I unpublished this site. And then I was flooded with emails begging me to give people access to the resources that I had provided here (reviews, free printables, how-tos, etc). So, I put it back up thinking I would eventually do a hard edit.

But what a daunting task...over a thousand posts. Every one of them needs to be gone through so I can figure out what to update, what to delete, etc. I regret not simply unpublishing the site four years ago and going through it at my leisure, ignoring the begging emails. It would have been the right thing to do. I admit that was a mistake.

Better late than never?

So my project this summer (or one of them, anyway), is to do the hard edit on this site, because I think there is beneficial content here, but my family deserves to have their privacy prioritized over what strangers on the internet think.

Today, I unpublished every single post. Tomorrow, I will start going through those posts and we will see what is worth sharing with the world, what needs to be moved to a private blog, and what needs to be deleted into the cyber trashcan.

Eventually, I will work through the free printables and other resources to see what can be updated and edited. If you want to receive updates, be sure to subscribe!