Local bloggers make the personal public on their popular Web sites

Samuel Pepys had his diaries. Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent hours on her letters. Emily Dickinson’s life was scrawled into tightly worded poems. And for a new generation of writers, life is captured in a very public sphere through the digital diaries known as blogs.

The mid-valley is full of fast-typing fingers, busy sharing bits of their life, from the mundane to the intimate. Often, the blogs are interesting only to a select few, or occasionally, only the writer herself. But other blogs offer a glimpse into a familiar or unfamiliar world that holds some promise, some insight, and sometimes a little magic.

From quilting to house renovation, pondering local politics to driving the back roads of Benton and Linn counties on a motorcycle, the world of mid-valley blogs is a surprisingly expansive one. By searching the Web and using sources such as orblogs.com, we’ve selected a few blogs that appeal to more than a handful of readers. If you know of other noteworthy blogs, we invite you to e-mail us, and we can highlight them on our own blog site.

Home sweet blog

Two curving brick paths wind through the front yard of Laurie Bridges and Eric Bailey’s Corvallis woodland ranch house, and daffodils have begun to open their vibrant heads. To fans of the popular Ranchredo.com blog at houseblogs.net, the idyllic scene is a familiar one. For the last two years, Bridges and Bailey have been renovating their 1950s ranch house, and letting the world take a peek at their progress.

In August 2005, the couple sold their three-year-old home at Willamette Landing with the hopes of buying an older house. After finishing painting and decorating their new home, they’d realized there was really nothing left to do, and they wanted a bigger challenge.

They found one in a shamrock-green ranch house nestled on a quiet street next to Dixon Creek. Although the house had a new roof and some nice new wood French doors, there wasn’t a lot else to recommend the place, except potential.

“Location was one important consideration,” Bailey said. The house was on a very quiet street, close to good schools, downtown and shopping, and there was room in the back yard to build an art studio.

Although inexperienced at remodeling, they decided to launch into a major project right out of the gate. They decided to gut their kitchen, a project they estimated would take two months. It took seven.

While Bailey did more of the grunt work, Bridges was constantly photographing the progress. Bailey suggested she throw the photos up on a Web site so family and friends could watch their progress, but Bridges couldn’t just do something slapdash.

“I have to have it look good,” Bridges said.

Meanwhile, Bridges had discovered a site called “Houseblogs” that featured a number of blogs by folks around the country in the process of remodeling their homes. Most of the houses were turn of last century, or early 1900s bungalows. There were only a handful of mid-century ranch homes featured.

Realizing she had found her niche, Bridges created a blog for their project called ‘1951 Ranch Redo,’ (www.ranchredo.com).The site quickly became popular with Houseblog fans, and turned into a resource for other home renovators looking for inspiration. It also turned into a great way for Bailey and Bridges to get help and suggestions from their friends on the Web whenever they got into a home-redo bind.

For instance, when Bailey decided to take down the home’s exterior mahogany siding and refinish it, he turned to the blogosphere to find out the best way to go about it.

“Just finding out how to do that, the best way to strip the home,” became a big discussion point on the blog. The result was a time-intensive project that turned out beautifully.

The site’s popularity is likely due not only to the increasing popularity of ranch-style homes, but also the fact that it’s updated frequently, the couple said.

“It has a lot to do with volume,” Bridges said. Quality, of course, is an issue, but keeping the site constantly updated keeps fans coming back. And with years of renovation ahead of them, there’s no end in sight for Ranchredo.

Boots on the ground

When Deb Conrad’s son, Cpl. Shane Conrad, deployed to Iraq for the first time, the Marine mother struggled to find a way to channel her fear and her curiosity about the situation overseas.

She began searching the Web for news resources about Iraq that she wasn’t finding in the local media.

“I wanted ‘boots on the ground’ stories,” the Lebanon woman said.

She discovered military blogs were a great source of information on the kind of stories she was searching for.

“I had my favorites I read almost every day,” she said.

So when Shane was deployed a second time, Conrad decided the things she’d learned, not only about Internet resources, but also about surviving the deployment of a son, would make great blog topics themselves. So she launched her own blog called “Marine Corps Moms” (www.marine

corpsmoms.com). The blog became a way to share what she’d learned with large groups of people under similar circumstances.

“Instead of answering e-mails, it was more efficient to put things on a Web site,” she said.

The site gave her a feeling of being proactive while her son was serving in Iraq.

“It was a great way for me to cope,” she said. “I had a lot of anxiety, a lot of negative emotions.”

She worked with local company Salyris Studios to set up the site.

When Conrad began organizing a local branch of “Operation Santa” to gather donations to send holiday gifts to deployed Marines, she used the blog to promote the project.

“It allowed us to have a national presence in a hurry,” she said. Because of donations flowing in from across the country, they were able to expand their donation from gifts for 35 Marines to stuffing 6,000 stockings.

At the peak of her son’s second and third deployment, when she was blogging several times a day, Conrad said, she had between 5,000 and 10,000 hits a day on her site. While that number has dropped, and the frequency of her posting has also dropped now that her son is home for good, she is still maintaining the blog as a resource for military families.

Her son had limited access to the Internet during his second deployment, but he was occasionally able to read his mother’s blog, and he’d call or e-mail her to let her know he was paying attention.

Conrad said she’s received a lot of positive responses to her blog, with some military parents calling it a “lifesaver.” She still culls the Internet for stories about Iraq, and tries to put stories with more positive content on the site.

“We have a lot of parents reading” the site, she said, and she doesn’t want to focus on negative stories, although, “I don’t sugar-coat stuff.”

She also offers a lot of helpful hints to families facing an upcoming deployment of a son or daughter. Parents are usually prepared to send their children off to college, but few know what to do when those children go to war.

“Doctor Spock doesn’t cover that,” she joked.

OTHER LOCAL BLOGS

Musings of an Intrepid Commuter

“Emergency braking in a corner is a whole different exercise than when in a straight line. It’s the kind of skill you never need until you need it, if you know what I mean. Then you REALLY need it. Be honest. How many of us actually practice skills like this on our own for the times we need it? I have an advantage because I teach this stuff all the time. It’s always fresh in my mind. Would I do it as an average rider? I would certainly hope so.”

http://intrepidcommuter.blogspot.com/

The Corvallist

“In more narrow categories within the eco-friendly ratings, Corvallis ranked second in the number of green public buildings, has more people who bicycle to work than anywhere else, as well as a significant number of people walking to work and using public transit, and, of course, has a high number of farmers’ markets and food co-ops. We’re mean, green, biking machines, apparently.”

www.corvallist.com/blog.html

F.M. Jack House

“I’m feeling a lot better about all of the work and beer and pizza and money and blood that’s going to be going into this house. It’s a lot easier now to stand outside and look out at the property and see what great things we can make from it.”

http://fmjackhouse.blogspot.com/

Alaskan Chocolate Quilting Company

“There were so many beautiful quilts at the show. The work in many of the quilts was unbelievable. We also saw Jean McDaniel’s colorful Heartstrings quilt in APNQ’s fifth invitational traveling exhibit. Seeing all these beautiful quilts made us all want to go home and work on out (sic) quilts.”

www.alaskaquilt.com