One of the blogs in the Moultrie Creek family is Moultrie Journal. It’s my scrapbook of family and local history. Here’s where I post interesting photos, stories, multimedia presentations and other bits and pieces about my family and this wonderful place we call home – which just happens to be our nation’s oldest city*.
Moultrie Journal blog showing sliding photo gallery and a photo documentary post.
Because it’s a blog I can pull in all kinds of content in all sorts of formats. It doesn’t matter what kind of digital storytelling project I create, they can all be showcased here. Often a post is nothing more than a photo with a caption. Others are embedded content like the Mission tour shown in this example. I save my photo documentaries as movies which can be embedded from my Vimeo account. PDF documents can be saved on Scribd and also embedded on the blog site. It’s an eclectic mix and that suits me just fine. Add a couple of categories and tags for each post and WordPress carries most of the organizational load for me.
Why embed much of the content? Two reasons. First, these movies, photographs and slideshows are not taking up space on the blog site (especially important if you’re using a hosted blog with limited free space allowance). Second, these media platforms also serve as off-site archives/backup for my projects. I have content spread out across photo-sharing, video-sharing, slide-sharing and document-sharing platforms, but the blog is the one central spot where it all comes together.
There’s loads of content from other sites too. I have no problem including photos from the Florida Memory archives – with proper credit and links of course. Should I discover a cousin who’s blogging, I’d be delighted to include posts that point to her stories. One very nice benefit of this idea is that the more you link to other sites (and, hopefully, they link to you) the more attention you all get from the search engines. That could lead to finding and connecting with even more cousins.
Chances are good your family history center will look and act nothing like mine. That’s as it should be. Fortunately, blogs are flexible enough to suit just about any style so we can each create our family in our own way. Ain’t technology great?
*The politically correct description is “oldest continuously-occupied European settlement in the contiguous 48 states”.
