About Reunify Gally

ReunifyGally is no longer my primary blog. Most of the time and energy I have available to invest in blogging I now spend on my other blog, We Can Do, which focuses on people with disabilities (and Deaf people) in developing countries, with an emphasis on human rights issues and economic and social development (poverty reduction, etc.).

These days, I use this blog primarily as a place where I can post things that don’t fit in at my primary blog. For example, if I see an on-line video that amuses me, I might post a link to it. Or if I feel like saying a few words in support of policies (or politicians) I favor, I might use this blog as a platform for doing that.

For example, I want to see more countries ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). If something comes up related to the CRPD in developing countries, I’ll most likely post it at We Can Do. Or if it relates to the CRPD in general (whether in developing countries or elsewhere) then I might post it at RatifyNow.org, where I occasionally help with their blog.

But sometimes I want to target Deaf readers, on the CRPD or on other topics. Or sometimes I want to express my opinions more strongly than I usually allow myself to do at We Can Do or RatifyNow. When that happens, I might post something here instead. (I do express my opinions at We Can Do, but in most posts I try to be more low-key and more factual because We Can Do is primarily meant to be an information and resource sharing service, with only a relatively light touch of advocacy. I only rarely post straight opinion pieces at We Can Do. Mostly I post announcements, news items, press releases, and links to resources and toolkits that might benefit people in my target audience.)

For a while in 2007, I did a lot of blogging at ReunifyGally about the Americans with Disabilities Restoration Act. And before that, I had originally intended for this blog to focus on promoting healing within the broader (on campus/off campus) Gallaudet University community following the contentious protests in the fall of 2006. (Hence the name: Reunify Gally) But I probably won’t have time or energy to return to either of these issues in a substantive way.

Why Keep the Old Name?
If the name of this blog (ReunifyGally — i.e., Reunify Gallaudet) is no longer appropos, then why don’t I change it? Because I’m not aware of a way that I can change the name without also changing the address of the blog. And the only way to change the address or name of a wordpress.com blog is to delete the entire blog and start a new one from scratch.

In other words, once you start a blog at wordpress.com, then either you keep on with that blog under the name you started with, or you delete it and start over. You can’t play around with the name after you’ve created the blog. Maybe other blogging platforms work differently. Or maybe it works differently for people with the technical skills to host their own blog on their own server. I don’t know. But that’s how it is if you run a blog hosted at wordpress.com

It’s possible that at some point I’ll go through my posts and weed out some of the old ones that I don’t like any more, or that just aren’t timely any more. But I hate to ditch all the old posts just because the name isn’t quite right any more. And I don’t have time or energy right now to try figuring out how to transfer posts to a new blog site, especially since I would first want to re-read each post to decide whether it’s even worth the bother of transferring.

This blog will never be a busy site. If you want busy, check out the blog to which I’m more seriously devoted. I’ll probably always blog too sporadically, on too many different topics, to ever have a consistent thematic focus (except, possibly, the CRPD, or disability rights generally). But I hope you enjoy the few occasional things I do offer here.

And, yes, ReunifyGally is fed to DeafRead.com — they don’t always pick up everything, but they pick up some things.