Blog Year January Update

January is over and I thought I’d check in to see how the challenge has been treating me so far.  I have to say, I completely underestimated how difficult this was going to be for me. It wasn’t coming up with content that was the issue, it was time management.  I thought this would going to be a lot easier than when the I did the month long blogging challenge a while back because I only have to come up with one post a week not one every single day.

This is actually kind of an issue because it isn’t forcing me to write every day so Thursdays have been sneaking up on me and I almost missed it the other week when I just got back from vacation.

But I’m very proud to say that I haven’t missed a week yet, and I’ve even had a few posts in between Thursdays.  I think what I need to do in February is build more a writing “grove.” Maybe do some more prewriting on posts during the week and keep checking WordPress daily. I’ve be working with the Reader function to force me to check it every day to read content.

I have to say that I like this challenge much more than I did the month long one because it feel like it’s a more regular part of my life instead of this wild thing I’m doing for a month.  I just feel like a blogger and I haven’t really felt like one before even though I’ve been running blogs off and on for over ten years now.

Blog Year

If you’ve been following this blog for the last month, you may have noticed that a) I’ve finally updated it and b) I really wish that I wrote more on here.  So in the interest of writing more and the fact that it is the new year, I’ve decided to do another blogging challenge.  This time I’m going to write one post a week for the entire year.

Here are the rules for this challenge:

• I have to have at least one post on this blog by midnight each Thursday.
• Each post has to be between 300 – 600 words.
• Every post needs to have at least one picture.
• While I can – and hope to – post more than once a week, only one post counts for that week and doing more won’t count for other weeks.  This will keep me from posting five times one week and then taking a month off.
• I can use the scheduling feature, but only a week in advance.  This will keep me more present on the blog and keep me from automating the hell out of it.
• I need to actually revise the posts I’m making.  Last time was really done off the cuff, and there were a lot of typos and errors that should have been avoided.
• If I do miss a week, I’ll have to post twice the next week.  I owe myself 52 posts.
• While this post is going to count for this week.  Other posts that are updates on how I’m doing or feeling about the challenge itself will not count as posts for that week.
• If I get a comment on a post, I should try to comment back to the person.  This challenge is going to be about blogging not just writing.
• I’m going to be a better member of the blogging community by checking out others blogs and commenting on three posts a week.  This will need to be done by each Friday.

While this might sound ambitious, my last blogging challenge was for 30 days straight and that went really well.  This is only going to require 52 posts which really isn’t that much more than last time and I’m going to have a whole lot more time to do it.

Also, you may have noticed the rules about reaching out to other blogs.  The last challenge was to really see if I could produce that much writing on a tight time-frame.  This challenge is to see if I can become a much more active blogger.  Part of that is sticking to a posting schedule, but another part of that is becoming part of the blogging community.  Lucky for me, WordPress has a lot of great tools for finding blogs and bloggers and reaching out to them.

So this is my new years resolution, and I do think I’m going to be able to stick to it.  I feel pretty good about 2015 and I look forward to all of the strangeness that being a blogger is going to bring.

Image via – Flickr