Blogging revisited

I attended the church wedding of Shawn and Jean in the morning, followed by dinner in the evening. Having known the couple for 10 years, I was very happy to see them finally tie the knot. They are really nice, decent people and truly deserve each other. I also met many seniors from the University of Bristol. It was good catching up with them after all these years.

What got me was how many of them mentioned, on separate occasions, that they visited my website/blog. I didn't expect them to know about it, because I didn't have a blog in the late 1990s when I was in University. I purchased 'vantan.org' and set up a simple website where I manually posted updates on my life.

I learnt that each senior found my website on their own, via web searches for restaurant reviews and other things. One senior found my blog via another friend's blog, which she was referred to by another friend. Another senior found my site also by accident, then read my profile to check if I was the Vanessa Tan from Bristol.

Interestingly, I sat next to the parents of one of my seniors, who's due to give birth to her first child soon. After telling her parents about the new media work I was doing, the mum shared that she also had a blog! However she stopped blogging early this year. I encouraged the mum to keep on blogging and suggested she could post photos of her forthcoming grandchild. I told her how I kept in touch with friends who were overseas, by looking at photos and videos of their kids.

I went home and immediately checked out my senior's mum's blog. It was well-written, with lots of photos that were nicely cropped. As she mentioned to me earlier, she had good rapport with her readers and I could see it from the number of comments posted. I too posted an encouraging comment, to remind her to keep blogging.

Who knows, Singapore may have a new 'grandma' blog soon!