Introducing Just Geeking By!

A few weeks ago I took a look at my blog and realised there was a problem; my name, my brand, blog title, whatever you want to call it. This blog has excited for several years, originally created as a narrative to my studies and then being relaunched last year. It has been roughly a year, and upon reaching this blogvanniversary I realised that this experiment into the blogging world was something I wanted to continue. Something I wanted to grow and expand. At the same time I had a few new ideas I wanted to implement and realised that having my Blog called by what essentially was it’s url ‘Ruby Wings Blog’ was just not gonna cut it.

It took a few days of deliberation before I approached Chris and my friends and asked the difficult question; what do I call it? In a space of a few hours I went through various ideas, putting words related to disabilities, geekery and gaming together and trying to find something that fit.

The result was ‘Just Geeking By’ a pun on the phrase ‘just getting by’ something that as a spoonie I have been known to say. I have my disabilities, health conditions which are never going to be cured and so I get by. Well, no, I GEEK by, thank you very much 😉

At the moment I’m not moving to a new domain name, however, all my social media accounts have/will be changing over to reflect the new name. If in October (aka birthday time) I feel everything is going well then I’m going to look into getting the matching domain name and move it over. Until then I’m sticking with the sub-domain.

What’s New?

Starting with the obvious; a new layout. I’ve moved things about, adding some things in and generally got a bit more professional. There’s spiffy new featured images for each post – some are still to come but after 3 days offline I decided it was time to get this thing back up! – and the menu has been cleared up and some new bits added. Specifically the interviews section has more to it, and will soon include a set of questions for spoonies, and the Reviews section has information about product reviews, sponsored posts and guest posts.

The biggest additions are two new sections; Free Blog Hosting and Blog Promotion.

Today is Random Acts of Kindness day and launching both of these today is very fitting. Free Blog Hosting is my way of giving back to the blogging community and helping people get on their feet with a self-hosted blog. Moving from a blog site to a self-hosted blog is a big step with lots of technical bits and bobs to navigate, throw in trying to find a host and learning about hosting and it’s a minefield. I can easily install wordpress for you and get you set up so you can explore your options and learn as you go. There are rules and requirements, and this is not a paid service so there are limits to what I offer. Head over to the hosting page to find out more if you’re interested!

Blog Promotion is another way that I aim to help bloggers, whether they be new or experienced. It is a list of links to various different ways of promoting your blog. You may be familar with retweet accounts on twitter, or facebook promotion groups? These and many more will be listed in this directory. Again, it’s totally free and I’m hoping to get a diverse and up to date range of useful links. Visitors can add their own links as well, which means if you’re an individual blogger hosting a linky or blog hop you can pop your link in too!

I’m still working on getting the Blog Promotion list set up, so if you have any suggestions for categories or links please let me know. I’ve also done my best to try and test everything, but new themes can sometimes throw up some random issues so if something doesn’t work let me know!

Finally, thank you to everyone who takes the time to visit, read and comment on my blog. It really does mean a lot to see that people enjoy my content and I look forward to taking this new step forward with you guys <3