Welcome to the new Green Blog!

Okay, I am going to be totally honest with you. I don’t really know how I should write this blog post. So I’ll just start now while I’m on a train journey through the southern parts of Sweden.

I was initially really excited to write this first blog post on this new-ish blog. But now it feels much harder, for some reason. Maybe that’s partly because of the long history of this website; after all, Green Blog has been online in one form or another since 2007. That’s 18 years now, and that’s crazy. For 18 years, Green Blog has been a part of my life — in both ups and downs.

Green Blog started as a simple WordPress blog that linked to interesting news articles and blog posts about our environment and changing climate. I don’t remember when, but some time not long after being launched, Green Blog became a blog with a focus on green tech and a greener web. And from that, Green Blog transformed into a more proper news blog that had multiple authors and contributors from around the world and that covered a much wider range of environmental topics. And it was somewhere here that Green Blog really started to grow in terms of visitors and engagement.

Green Blog became a popular website, probably mostly because of luck and timing. After all, at this time in history, internet blogs were still this new and cool medium on the internet. And it also helped that the environment and climate were seen as much more important issues.

It was soon clear that a simple comment section was not enough for all of this activity. We needed something that was more suited for proper discussions, and so an online forum was added to Green Blog. We first went with a stand-alone forum that was separated from the main blog. But that separation between the blog and the forum was cumbersome and complicated. For example, it required that both authors and readers used different accounts to post on the blog and engage in the discussions in the forum.

So work started to migrate the blog and all of its posts, comments, and content over to a digital platform that offered both a more social experience for our members and a more easily-managed website for us administrators. The new platform successfully integrated both our main blog and the forum into one single website with a bunch of cool new features. For example, the new website even allowed our members to upload photos and create their own green blogs.

For several years we had thousands of people that registered as members on our website, we wrote countless blog posts, and we all created thousands of topics and discussions in the forum. It was great and the site was full of activity. And I met many great people that took time from their busy lives to help me in various ways with the work on Green Blog. I am truly grateful for all of your help and contributions. Thank you.

But a few years back, the activity on the forum and blog started to die down. Most people started to spend their online time on social media instead on forums and blogs. I get that. It was the same for me. That just how it is, things change.

But it was not just Green Blog that was affected by this transformation of the web. It was sad to see how the people and activity on most online communities simply just disappeared. Many online communities sadly closed down and disappeared for good. But Green Blog remained open and running in the same way it had been for years. Until recently.

The old website is now completely gone, and I’ve turned Green Blog back into a simple online blog.

As I’ve explained, the activity on the forum had slowed down, but that didn’t mean that the work on the website had. Green Blog still required both time and money to keep going as an online community.

At the same time, as the internet has matured, several laws and regulations directed at online communities has been introduced that complicates things for community and website administrators such as myself. Don’t take that the wrong way. I think such laws and regulations, like GDPR, are mostly good and well-intended, especially from a user’s perspective. But they further complicate things for simple websites and online communities such as this one.

And for me personally, a lot has changed in my personal life over these 18 years. I can no longer spend the same amount of time managing this website as I’ve done in the past.

Managing an online community simply takes too much time and effort these days. While it’s been fun and challenging, I’ve felt that all the work I’ve put into keeping the Green Blog community up and running has taken too much time away from the actual blog. Managing the website was turning Green Blog into work — tiresome and boring work. And the most sad part is that I this caused me to write less. Sometimes it almost feels like I’ve forgotten how to write. And writing was the reason I started Green Blog in the first place!

So now, a new chapter begins for Green Blog. And I will try to get back into blogging, and I will do it on my own terms — when I have the time for it.

I intend to write both shorter and longer blog posts about various green topics that I find interesting. And I am going to add more of my own thoughts and comments into the posts than previously. That’s why you can see that the posts on the blog’s frontpage are divided into two different categories: one with posts that are short and quick and one with posts that are a bit longer and that delves more into one or more topics.

The comments will probably be mostly turned off for most blog posts. I will leave them open for some posts, such as this one, where I think that there can be some useful discussions. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how I can improve this new Green Blog, please do let me know in the comments below.

Change is hard. And this change was especially hard to do. After all, Green Blog has been online since 2007 and so much valuable content has been created and published on this website over those years. If it was possible, I would have moved the old content over to this new blog. But sadly it was not. And change was needed.

Thank you if you have read this far — you’re great!

P.S. Don’t forget that you can also follow Green Blog on various social media platforms (you can find them all in the footer below).