To ensure my future as a blogger and artist I am slowly uploading drawings, artwork and various media and actual craft and art for sale on other sites inlcuding Lulu, istockphoto, flickr, etsy and cafépress. This way there will be a record of my artwork for sale and not for sale on other sites if my site becomes lost or malfunctions so badly it does not exist any longer. With these sites I am thinking about my future online and perhaps creating my own personal art stock gearing for the future of online activity, growth and inspiration. This is a continuing long term goal for me.

I have also been toying with the idea of duplicating my blog on a free blogging platform and setting it to private view as a back-up for myself.

I find this seed collecting fascinating. I do this with my own garden. I can germinate, grow, eat and then save seeds for the next season. This way the seeds I collect will become acclimatized to my growing conditions. This will be my fourth year planting my own collected seeds. Every year they grow better.

There exists a huge repository of seeds from mainly Canada in Victoria BC. They only collect organic seeds that have not been genetically engineered or tampered with. Therefore what you plant in the ground and grow, you will be able to collect the seeds again and grow that specific variety of say, tomatoes without worry of a secondary or tertiary subspecies or worse an all female or all male plant growing in place of the original. It is always a good rule of thumb to purchase Heirloom seeds or plants. You know they are authentic then and that their dna has not been canabilized to not contain seeds (ie. Watermelon and bananas) nor have they been genetically engineered to grow mutations in the future.

There is a huge resemblance to seeds and blogs. Duplicating your content/seed is the only way to preserve it. Adding to it is ok but it has to be done with care and intelligence.

Just some intitial thoughts.
Take care,
Jessica

I have given myself a two-year outlook – the length of a domain name purchase – to see what becomes of my blog. And even that has been subdivided to see how things stand at the end of 2007.

With that view in mind, I guess it does impact my blogging. It feels easier to plan for a year or so – more manageable and less daunting. It would be great to think that my blog will still be active in 10 years time…searching for the illusive subscriber to get my Feedburner stats into double figures.