Longtime readers of my blog may have noticed I’m a bit more reticent about writing about my family life than I’ve ever been before. Back when Aidan was born, this could even have been considered a Mommy Blog for the overwhelming majority of posts that were focused on what my experience of motherhood was like.

And now, those posts are gone. Well, not gone per se but hidden. Private. They’re still stored on my blog, and I read them often, but I’ve decided to scale back on my self disclosure a bit. And it’s all my book’s fault.

When PWNED got published, I had to start working on my marketing months ahead of time. I knew my blog would be part of what publishing industry people call my “platform” and I had to give some serious thought to what was disclosed there.

If the book did well, and I was optimistic it would, my site had the potential of having hundreds of new visitors, many of whom I’d never met. I had to ask myself, how much did I want to share with total strangers?

I think this is a decision every blogger needs to make: How much to disclose, and about what. For example, I will happily share an embarrassing story about myself, but probably wouldn’t if it happened to my husband.

The funny thing is, I always knew there were people reading my blog whom I’d never met personally, but that never bothered me because I’m a tiny little blog in a vast sea of blogs and I was pretty sure no one cared all that much.

Now, though, strangers are visiting my blog (hello, there!) to find out more about me as a writer, and it’s my job to determine how much about my life they’re entitled to know.

So, I hid a lot of posts. About 200, in fact. In the grand scheme of 700 posts they probably won’t be missed. Unless you know what you’re looking for.

I just didn’t want Aidan to grow up someday resenting me for making it public knowledge that he did X, Y, or Z when he was growing up. I want him to make his own decision about how much of his life, if anything, he shares with the Internet.

So that’s why I’m a lot more reticent about my family now than I’ve made a habit of being in the past. It probably makes for less mommy-centric reading, and if that’s why you were reading this blog in the first place I apologize, but it’s what I felt was in my family’s best interest.

Now I just have to figure out what else I have that’s worth saying. How about that recent major sporting event?

Things look different around here, but don’t be alarmed! It’s just a little facelift for my blog. I’ve wanted a new look for a little while now, and while shopping for themes for my author website (coming soon!) I found this one and couldn’t resist.

So there you go.

I like it! What do you think?

Every so often I peek over at my Google Analytics information to see what people search for that brings them to my site. The results are usually boring, but occasionally there’s a whole new crop of keywords that tickle my fancy, and that’s when I like to share them with you!

Here we go, my favorite search terms of the last month:

• “Creepy stalker songs” Man, you write one post about a stalker song and suddenly your blog comes up on every search for creepy stalkers!
• “Angry hyena” In almost four years of blogging I have mentioned hyenas exactly twice. I think that’s approximately half as often as I should have been writing about hyenas.
• “Big onion” It turns out that that there’s the name of a tour company in New York, so I doubt that the person searching for this term meant to find my blog post about onions. That person stuck around for an hour, though, so maybe he/she read something they liked?
• “Cell phone deprivation symptoms” I think someone needs to write a book on this, stat. Preferably the author would be Temperance Brennan from the show “Bones” but as she’s fictional I’ll take whoever I can get.
• “Fetal alcohol syndrome nonsense” This person obviously knew what he/she was looking for there, but I know for a fact they didn’t find it on my blog.
• “Fit banshee into a minivan” This does sound like something I would do.
• “Hamster wheels for kids” I hope this person was searching for a hamster wheel for their child’s hamster, and not a child-sized hamster wheel for said child to run in.
• “One night stand fiance” I don’t know this person, but I have the feeling that if she’s doing this search she probably shouldn’t be getting married.
• “Punch in the face” I wonder what this person was looking for. A tutorial perhaps? I hope not, it’s pretty self-explanatory.
• “Why up a creek and not down a creek?” I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!?!?!