This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

I am not a professional cook, but I love to eat good food. I gravitate to cookbooks with big colored pictures; I need to see what I am striving to re-create to be inspired. I often improvise by combining the best parts of multiple recipes.

I’ve always like to cook, even as a young child, but typically just worked on producing brownies and chocolate-chip cookies which my dad loved to consume. My plans for a carefree 7th grade summer were curtailed when the first morning I awoke to find a stack of 3×5 cards on the counter with cooking instructions for the frozen food items sitting next to them. My summer family job was to make sure dinner was on the table by 5pm Monday-Friday.

After a few days of following the notes left for me, I ditched them and turned to The Joy of Cooking; we became great friends that summer. I looked for meals that could be thrown together relatively quickly, didn’t need a lot of supervision and where the ingredients and preparation sounded yummy (no pictures in The Joy of Cooking). What I learned about cooking that summer carried me well into my early adulthood; I could cook any type of protein, and for years a baked potato and steamed broccoli sufficed as my sides.

It was after I was married and had kids that I got the foodie bug. I wanted to expand my cooking repertoire, but I also was working full time and raising a family, so as with the summer of 7th grade, recipes needed to be simple with relatively few ingredients that could be done, start-to-finish in about an hour.

At any point in time, I tend to cycle through the same set of about about dozen recipes, but when I look back at years previous, the set is very different with very little overlap. I have lost track of many great recipes; they are most definitely ear marked in one of my many cookbooks, but they have in all sense, been forgotten. The purpose of this site is to (a) keep better track of the ones I love, and (b) be able to share them more easily with friends and family. Enjoy!