On Saturday I had the pleasure of hearing fashion blogger Susie Lau speak at the Costume Society’s conference. This year’s theme was Writing Fashion and so, rather excitingly for me, Lau was in conversation with my colleague Dr Agnès Rocamora whose recent research has been looking at fashion blogs. The discussion was an extremely interesting look at how fashion blogs have evolved since Lau started Style Bubble back in 2006, covering her background in history, fascination with clothing and progression to professional blogger status. As you might imagine, she’s an eloquent speaker and responded to Rocamora’s thought provoking questions with enthusiasm.
As I tried to think of a question to ask, something that would be pertinent and perhaps useful to me as a blogger, Lau answered an audience member who wanted to know how to access the Style Bubble archives, as there’s no obvious way to do this on the site. Now, my own blog’s archives as something of an untidy mess at the moment. Ever since Rarely Wears Lipstick moved to a new WordPress template last year, I’ve been aware that many of my posts from before the move have a key image that isn’t of a high enough quality for the new format. As I’ve rediscovered each post (perhaps because I want to link to it in a new post or re-share on social media), I update the images and make it look a bit tidier. However, I haven’t yet found the time to work through these in a methodical way.
It’s even worse for posts that were published before I moved to WordPress in 2012. Some of those images were hosted on Picasa (remember that?) and the formatting has not translated well. Once again, I’m slowly updating these, but only in an ad hoc fashion. I’ve been beating myself up over this for months… years, even, with so many ‘To Do’ lists in my notebooks containing a note to tidy up my archive posts. Well, do you know what? Susie Lau has the same problem with her archives. She has no idea how much it meant to me to hear her admit to that. If a professional blogger who gets invited to high profile catwalk shows is having the same issue, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself?
Of course, I’ve added another note to my ‘To Do’ list. Maybe I’ll finally get around to doing something about it this month?
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