WeblogPoMo 2024

I’m thinking about throwing in and trying to keep up with a daily posting schedule. Anybody else heard about this or interested in it?

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Yeah, I’ve been following her as she’s brainstormed this online… I’m not sure I’ll be able to complete a post per day with anything useful.

Yes, I’ve noticed that with the more intense challenges, like 100 Days To Offload for example, I think they have pros and cons. If you struggle to post generally, then yeah, maybe being forced to think about it more often could help. Maybe if you’re learning a language too, that could be a worthwhile endeavor. Say maybe a daily Toki Pona post for practice. But more often than not, I’ve felt participants to trend toward mediocrity (there’s probably a nicer word here), for the sake of ticking the box / raising the number.

That’s just me though, I’m definitely a ‘quality over quantity’ kinda person.

I follow Annie on Mastodon and have been contemplating joining!

I can’t do a post per day due to my chronic illnesses, so I’m thinking about doing once per week, since that would still be more than my posting frequency in April.

I also might combine it with a post type that I’ve been considering called “From the Archives.” Basically reposting things from Cohost or defunct blogs that I think are worth revisiting, with some commentary. Low effort, but not posting for the sake of posting.

Yeah to achieve a full quality blog post every day, you’d have to keep a bunch of them backlogged to publish on days you can’t write, which idk if that is against the spirit of this? The point might be to push people to write shorter posts so that it is something that can be done daily.

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I think this might be a chance to normalise short blog posts again. Check out this one from back in the day, short, sweet and got my point across Dayum

I just realised I’m missing my 2004 archive!

@arevakhach prepare for my mediacrocy

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I post to my Journal almost daily so this technically wouldn’t be too difficult for me, but writing stuff people actually want to read? That’s a little more challenging. :laughing:

Could be fun to try though!

I think it depends on the kind of blog you have. If you have a personal blog, then challenges like this are ok - you note down something that happened to you.

Blogs with more of a theme don’t fit so well, because you’re unlikely to be generating great new ideas that frequently - anything worth saying needs a bit of time to percolate.

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More generally, I think viewing blogging as a problem to be solved by writing more frequently is the wrong way to go about it. You solve the problem by reading and being read more frequently - that is, blogging feels vibrant and motivating when you’re part of a subculture or scene. Reading others and being responded to.

So I feel like these projects are most successful within a group of people who have a shared interest.

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haha this is so pre-Twitter vibes

This is a great point, I haven’t thought about blogging like this before. You’re right, I find I am more motivated to blog because I read everyone’s awesome posts here and can share my own.

This reminds me of a pagan blogging challenge that was popular… well, back when pagan blogging was more of a thing. There was at least the implication that people would read each others’ posts, even if it seemed not to happen much for less popular bloggers (like me).

I think as someone who doesn’t feel like he’s part of “a scene” there’s an appeal to something where I can see a list of people who’re actively posting and looking for people to share it with, you know?

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Here we go, post #1 Top Boy

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It was the pagan blogging challenges I was thinking of also! But from a different perspective:

I was thinking, if we had a 32bit Cafe blog project, it would be tricky for me because I write on religious topics - and would that be of interest to anyone else in the blogging ring? And the same would be true for everyone else, whatever personal thing their internet space is dedicated to. So it’d have that risk of demotivation for all participants.

‘blog about internet and technology stuff’ would be ok - it’d work as this is an interest we have in common - but it’d have a political downside, in terms of, we (or at least, I) want to expand the personal web to everybody - not just people who are uncommonly interested in it or enjoy it as a skill - but as everyone’s everyday internet. So I worry that whenever we get pulled towards ‘let’s all talk about tech, the thing we have in common’ it has a broader impact & I want to push back against that and keep my personal website spaces reflective of all that I am offline.

& this is true for a lot of hobby web projects & campaigns like, by nature their first adopters are tech hobbyists, who then connect via the things they have in common, and it’s hard to expand the circle beyond that because it takes on the personality of the people who are there.

Alright, post #1, let’s see how long I can keep this up :smiley:
https://yequari.com/blog/2024/05/intermittent-fasting/

Generally we emphasize writing about what is interesting to you. A hypothetical 32bit blog club would likely have prompts that would encourage you to write about those topics rather than just choosing a broad topic like web and technology, which as you point out, excludes non technical people just doing this for fun or otherwise are uninterested in writing about it. Think like the prompts for the events and code jams, which can be interpreted and answered in many different ways.

This is the last thing we want you to focus a website or blog about. We hope that at the Cafe we encourage everyone to bring themselves to their web creations. The web is already full of technical posts, we want to see the things that interest you (if tech is your interest though, by all means).

Like yequari said, once we (I) finally get off our butts, the blog club will provide prompts that you can take in any direction you like as long as it fits within the theme :slight_smile:

I’m using WeblogPoMo2024 as way to get away from tech related posts as that’s been my jam recently.

I tried to do that challenge… last year I think? Starting in January? But nobody else was doing it so I felt a bit like when you’re in school and you can’t tell if everybody’s laughing at you because they don’t like you or if they’re just as shy as you are, so I stopped.

I think if I have a theme it’s probably ‘habits and systems’ or something but we’ll see if that sticks. XD

I don’t mean there being a rule or requirement to post on certain topics, I mean in a more organic sense: people are motivated by their desire to be read, and gravitate towards topics they think others will be interested in, or topics they’ve attracted attention for in the past. It’s being read that keeps a blogging scene vibrant.

Do you have a link to it? Or are you thinking of the one that was alphabetic (which I could never get into)

This was day 2/post 2 from yesterday: Wu-Tang: An American Saga

Drafting the third for day 3 atm!

Day 3: Everything Is Recorded: Friday Forever

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