From December 2007 until February 2010, Callan blogged at NOVA Geoblog. Using a Blogger platform, NOVA Geoblog was published via FTP to Callan’s Northern Virginia Community College website. In February of 2010, Blogger decided to stop supporting FTP publication, which meant that the old paradigm had to change.
At about the same time, NOVA Geoblog hit 1000 posts, an occasion which prompted some reflection on the nature of the blog. Fed with the perspectives of 88 surveyed readers, Callan decided to start a new blog, Mountain Beltway, for the geological content, using WordPress as the platform. While NOVA Geoblog had initially been intended for geology students at Northern Virginia Community College, it soon attained a readership that wrapped around the world. Mountain Beltway was aimed specifically at that global audience, while acknowledging the author’s home base of Washington, D.C.
A second blog, DC Geology Events, was launched to announce talks, field trips, museum openings, and other geologically-interesting events in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. If you’re in the National Capitol area and interested in learning more about geology, pop over there for the latest events.
NOVA Geoblog was closed and was left inert on the NOVA servers for some years, but (skipping ahead) when Callan left NOVA in 2020 to join the faculty at Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC), NOVA deep-sixed the archive. You can still find those old posts on the Wayback Machine, but it’s spotty coverage.
Picking up the narrative: In October 2010, the American Geophysical Union offered to host Mountain Beltway on their servers as part of a new blog collective. Having independently-authored blogs hosted by a professional society is a visionary move by AGU, and Callan was honored to be invited to be an inaugural contributor. Mountain Beltway joined six other independently-authored earth and space science blogs, and the AGU Blogosphere was born.
When this blog expresses opinions, those opinions are solely those of the author, and are not intended to be representative of Northern Virginia Community College, Piedmont Virginia Community College, the Virginia Community College System, the Commonwealth of Virginia, or the American Geophysical Union.