Memoirs of a Teapot Turns One! + My Favourite Images of 2017

This week Memoirs of a Teapot turns one! I can’t quite believe that the blog has been online for a year now! I still consider myself a beginner blogger and there a lot of things I’d still like to learn about blogging, but I also feel like the blog has come a long way since February 2017. Check out the journey so far…

What happened on Memoirs of a Teapot 2017?

A Spider Web Tea Set has the honour of being the first post published on Memoirs of a Teapot on the 18th February 2017. I actually drew my inspiration for blogging from researching this tea set for a university assignment the previous year. I loved discovering new things, historically significant information, and the personal history surrounding this set so much that I thought, why not do a blog all about historical objects?! This post is one of the most viewed and most searched for posts on Memoirs of a Teapot and is still one of my favourites.

Learning the back end of blogging, particularly in the first few months, was tough. Memoirs of a Teapot is a self managed site. This means that I use a web hosting service to gain my ‘piece of the web’ and then I manage the site myself. This involves finding, downloading, and customising a web template; this determines what the website is actually going to look like. It also involves using plug-ins (think apps) to help me govern certain aspects of the site i.e. contact forms and site security. Not having much of a coding background (read; absolutely none at all), plug-ins are a life saver!

Once the site was pretty much up and running how I liked it, I could really get stuck into working out how to write blog posts for the web, work out a planning strategy, learn some basic photo editing skills, and decide what sort of content I wanted to post about. That was a learning curve in itself. I am used to writing 3000 word essays and that certainly wouldn’t do! Historical objects are always going to be the blog’s main focus – I did a thesis way back when on the archaeology of weapon burials, and I still think objects are the most tangible way to learn about the past. But I intend to keep plenty of variety in the blog, so stay tuned for more posts on historical buildings, documentaries, teaching ideas, and current history articles!

So What’s the Plan for 2018?

I’ve recently begun planning my blog posts in a calendar. This is so much easier than picking a topic the day before (or on the day!) when I wanted to post something! I currently have blog posts planned well into July, so I’m keen to get into it!

The Historical Objects Series from A-Z began in October with A is for Armour. The plan is to continue on this year, with D coming up next. There are a few letters that I’m still not quite sure what I’m going to write on (think crazy letters like X), so if you have some suggestions, feel free to let me know!

The plan this year is to post more consistently. My goal is to post once a week and generally publish on Mondays. Yes, this post is coming out on a Friday…. I’m working on it! 😛

So twelve months and forty-seven published posts later, here we are at the start of Memoirs of a Teapot Year 2! I hope to continue publishing posts that keep you interested and give you plenty of random conversation fillers about the history of the world around us!

Some of My Favourite Images of 2017

I take plenty of images with my trusty phone camera. Historic buildings that I come across, vintage objects in antique stores, that sort of thing! And I can’t always publishing them on the blog… So for my enjoyment and your viewing pleasure, here are a handful of my favourite unpublished historical images from 2017.