Blaugust: The Halfway Point

Today is August the 16th, which means we’re now about half way through the Blaugust blogging event. In case you haven’t heard, this event was created by Belghast over at Tales of the Aggronaut, and the challenge is to write 31 blog posts over the course of the month. I’ve been taking part in the event and have published a post every day so far. I’ve found the event really informative, and since we’ve reached the half way point, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts on how I’ve found it.

It’s worth pointing out that I only started this blog a few days before the Blaugust event began, so my perspectives may be a little different from people who have been blogging for much longer, and are perhaps experiencing a disruption in their usual blogging schedule more than my trial by fire perspective. I’ve really learnt a lot from the Blaugust event, but I think perhaps the main lesson I have learnt might have become apparent to me anyway in time. When I first began, I expected to do much more ‘big picture’ type posts after establishing a bit of a body of articles. However, I quickly realised that this wouldn’t be a very sustainable approach to blogging. If you write an article, even a multi part one, on your attitudes towards free to play games, you can’t really do that again for some time. This is just one example, but I’m sure you take my point.

So Blaugust has forced me to try some different kinds of posts. I wanted to write a bit about an investigation mission in The Secret World because I love them so much, so I thought I’d take some pictures and write about what happened in order to showcase what they are all about. I actually thought this would be a pretty quick post but when you take into account sorting screenshots into the right order, taking notes of what happened, and trying to make it sound a bit more interesting than “and then I did this and then I did that” (which I’m still not convinced I pulled off), it actually became immensely time consuming.

As well as offering a great opportunity to perhaps enhance the pace at which I have learnt some lessons, Blaugust has also helped me to appreciate the value in setting aside a fairly set period of my day to writing. Putting in place a schedule and a process for writing and posting, and even to some extent catching up on other blogs, is something I’m sure will put me in good stead for the future.

The final thing which I have really appreciated about Blaugust, is that it has helped me to find lots of other great blogs, new people to follow on Twitter, and even some new podcasts. It has also contributed to my blog getting seen by people who probably wouldn’t have seen it otherwise, which is really encouraging when you are first starting out.

So those are some of my thoughts on what Blaugust has meant for me so far. I talked a little about this on the latest Contains Moderate Peril podcast, so check it out if you’re interested. Thanks to Roger and Brian for having me on, I always have a great time.