Where I’m At With My Unschool Blog

I’ve created a monster, a huge blog that needs a lot of maintenance. It’s sucking up my money and time and giving me headaches.

Frequently, this blog falls apart or runs so slowly that readers give up waiting for new pages to appear. I understand how visitors might get frustrated. Some days, even I don’t want to go anywhere near my blog. I’m tempted to hit the delete button to eliminate all the problems I don’t want to fix.

I’ve told a few friends that I’m only maintaining this unschooling blog until the end of the year. When 2026 arrives, there will be no more blog. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be.

There’s one thing holding me back from freeing myself from my problem blog. It’s not the thought that readers will miss my posts because my blog’s heyday is over. People are reading about unschooling elsewhere. There are a million unschoolers out there on the Internet sharing their stories.

I haven’t yet deleted my blog because I’ll miss my posts if they disappear forever. They’re a big part of my life story. I must find a way to save them before doing anything drastic. I don’t want to do something that I can’t undo.

This morning, my blog was in the digital workshop again. As I turned plugins on and off and changed settings on everything possible, I imagined starting my blog again from scratch, reposting my stories one at a time. I’d use optimised images and avoid non-essential plugins. I’d create a simpler blog that would more likely stay in one piece.

Eventually, I sorted out today’s problem. Right now, everything is working. Pages are changing at a reasonable but not super-fast rate.

If you’d like to read my stories while they’re available, please hurry. But once you’re here, take your time. Don’t focus on page speed. Go slowly as you explore.

Sometimes slow is good, isn’t it? We rarely absorb much when we rush from post to post, scanning as many as possible. But when we stroll through the pages, we can ponder the words.

If you’d like more unschooling ideas, check out The Ladies Fixing the World podcast. Cecilie Conrad, Sandra Dodd, and I are back with another season – season 3 – of long-form unschooling conversations. Maybe I’ll return another day to tell you more about our recently published episodes.

Unless, of course, my blog breaks down again. If that happens, I shall walk away.