Another brand new guest blogger on VBU!, please welcome Have Gone Vegan. Here she is in her own words, “I’ve been vegan for 5 years, reside in the Niagara region of Ontario Canada, and my blog deals with vegan identity and how we can try to become better vegan advocates.” Follow Have Gone Vegan‘s blog and please give her a huge welcome!
Clicked on a bunch of vegan blogs I hadn’t visited for a while the other day, only to be greeted by a Sorry, the blog you were looking for does not exist. more times than I liked. Yikes. Or, I found blogs all forlorn, lonely and dusty, abandoned by former guardians. And I get it, I do. I once read that most blogs have a shelf life of about a year, and blogs can take up a lot of time, energy and a life of their own if you’re not careful, but I always worry when I come across abandoned sites. Because where do dead blogs go anyway?
Did the author lose interest? Steam? Did life demands crowd out the time necessary to cultivate a blog that needs attention to survive? That I understand too, as I have a few of my own previous blogs floating around as my passion shifted to veganism. But I could never get myself to kill off my ex-loves (who knows who might still be helped, inspired or amused by them), so chose to leave forwarding addresses instead.
My real worry with vegan blogs though, is that its owner has had a change of heart. I remember reading a blog by a self-described “middle-aged vegan chick” and being quite excited (yay, I’m a middle-aged vegan woman too and can relate!), and poof, before I knew it the blog had disappeared completely. Fine, I understand if you don’t want your record of thoughts to exist online if you’re no longer contributing, but maybe give some kind of notice? Otherwise, I’ll be wondering if you’re no longer vegan, that you’ve chosen to unsee what you once saw, and unknow what you once knew. And that would be too sad for words.
This summer I’m trying to get caught up with blogs I’ve neglected, perhaps prune a few from my list that are no longer a good match for me (it’s not your blog, it’s me!), and add some new ones to the mix. Hard, because I think all vegan blogs deserve readers, but it’s almost impossible to read them all, and if you’re anything like me you already suffer from information overload. One blog I will be keeping an eye on though is by someone whom I recently “met” online. While Linda writes at My Name Is Fluffy, her thinking and reasoning is anything but, so check out her site if you like.
And keep on vegan blogging everyone!
