The blog about the blog...

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This week I’m going to blog about our blog and so to start with here’s a brief history…

“This week at Yew Tree,” was started on the 27th March 2009 which means we’re just a couple of months off it’s 4th birthday!  This in itself seems bizarre.  It certainly doesn’t seem like I’ve been writing a blog every week without fail for almost 4 years – that’s a total, including this one, of 199 blogs.  200 if you count this one.  Our first guest blogger all that time ago was Emily McGee, who at that time was the tender age of 14.  In total there have been 548 blogs so far and so that means by the time I post this one and this weeks guest blog that’ll hit the milestone of 550…impressive eh!?  However what I think is more impressive is that we have an average of about 150 hits each week and that’s after taking off a percentage for the silly spider bots that roam around the internet.  That, I reckon, is quite some following…

I firmly believe that the blog is a valuable resource.  For a start it’s an archive of our achievements, our discoveries, our experiences and the way the youth theatre develops and grows all the time.  In addition it’s a great way to reflect on what’s going on with the youth theatre day to day and you all know what a fan I am of reflection.  With each blog you get the chance to see the youth theatre and it’s activity from a different perspective, read what it means to someone else and through that get to develop your own perspective and views about your experiences.  Equally by writing the blog you get to share your thoughts and opinions, celebrate victories and ambitions…share frustrations and concerns.  I think that we have created a priceless thing together and I’m hoping we can maintain it for many years to come…

To that end I have two requests…

1.  Please volunteer to write me a blog every now and again instead of me having to go begging – if you’ve been delighted by something or confused, if you’ve been enlightened, or experienced an achievement or felt admiration or an awareness of something or someone…instead of just half thinking about it write it down and send it to me.  You can do this as a fb message or an email and then I can post it as a blog.  You don’t have to spend ages or write loads – half an hour or so, a few hundred words…that’s all it takes.  You wouldn’t believe how happy it makes when someone offers me a blog instead of me having to ask people – it would be lovely if it happened a little more often.  Equally it would be great to have some fresh voices in the blog…someone we have never heard from, or haven’t heard from in a while.  I find myself relying on the same people a lot sometimes as I know they’ll take the time and their blogs are good but it was always meant to have contributions from lots of voices…it would be nice if one of them was yours…

2.  I know lots of you read the blogs because you tell me you do and I have the analytical stats to prove it…and I know a lot of you enjoy them because you tell me that too.  Some of you read them every week, some store them up and have a blog fest at suitable intervals.  It would be so nice if you gave some feedback, added a comment to the link on the facebook page – engaged in dialogue about what you’d read…not every week but every now and again.  Then the writer of the guest blog would get a sense of the fact that what they are writing is being read and thought about and most of all valued…

Finally I’d like to say a very large thank you to everyone that has read the blog over the last three and three quarter years and all of those people who have contributed to it! I appreciate every word from everyone of you…

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