Where Did You Learn All Your Blog Skills?!

*All photos in this post are from a recent photoshoot out in the garden... summer has arrived!*

"Where Did You Learn All Your Blog Skills?"

This was one of the questions asked in my annual blog survey and when I was asked it, I sort of thought to myself, "what blog skills, I have blog skills?" I'm glad that someone thinks I do!

If you want me to answer this question properly, sit down, make yourselves comfortable and tune in...

A couple of years ago now, in 2011, I started distance education. Living away from home for my schooling wasn't really suiting me and I never say no to an adventure so I was enrolled in SIDE (Schools of Isolated and Distance Education). I was so excited to get started and be in (some sort of) control of my own learning.

One of the first English topics was blogging. Of course, I was really interested and set straight to work. One of the tasks was to find three blogs through a website with a collection of Australian blogs and do an analysis on them. I found a few that sounded interesting... I remember one was an environment focused design sort of blog and another "A Not So Perfect Life". I did the analysis for the design blog before discovering that "A Not So Perfect Life" wasn't being written anymore, but the author, Tamsyn, had a new blog "Max and Me". I head over there and sort of never left. Literally. I read and read and read and became inspired and forgot about my schoolwork...

I didn't hand in very much work for my English course that year and failed the blogging topic. But regardless, I kept on reading Max and Me and through it, found more blogs to read and eventually, at the start of 2012, started this little blog here.

So... to answer the question, "where did you learn all your blog skills?", it was definitely not in English class, but mostly through other amazing bloggers out there (like Tamsyn) who keep inspiring me!

Also, at the start of this year I did an e-course written by A Beautiful Mess, which was interesting but didn't really change much in the way that I write and stuff like that. It must have helped a bit though because that was in January, when I had plenty of spare time (summer holidays) so I posted heaps and even started a blogging calendar to plan out everything. Now the posts just sort of come when I feel like it or have the time (I hardly ever schedule posts).

As for my photos, sometimes they're really bad and other times not so bad. With my mum being a photographer, I've been getting her to teach me a few things and try to improve my photos. I'm not so good with editing yet, so mostly she helps out with that. But it's something I really want to learn to do by myself!

Where did you learn all your blog skills?