Farewell to Blaugust 2022 – A Round Up and Lessons Learned
Posted on August 31, 2022 by Aywren
And so we have come to the end of another Blaugust – apparently a well-attended Blaugust this year, which I’m happy to hear! It’s been fun to see posts from new and old bloggers alike, and I have followed a handful of new folks both on Twitter and RSS feeds this year!
I know that I’m ready for a break after writing a full month of posts – if you check the August 2022 archive, you can see all the posts that I’ve created this past month. Not all of them were titled Blaugust 2022 – those would be ones that were very specifically FFXIV posts – but I think they all count in the scheme of things.
With this final post, the count comes to 32 posts. But I subtract one because I was just posting up a trailer for patch 6.2 and it wasn’t really much of a word count. So a total of 31 posts, as planned.
This month allowed me to get a lot of ideas off my chest – some about making the move from WordPress to a static site and others were games that I kept meaning to write about for the past few months, but just never got around to it. Overall, I’ve somewhat run through the length of my backlog of ideas, so that’s another great reason to take a bit of a break.
So what were my lessons learned?
Basically, this was the first real test to see how blogging with a static HTML site over a long-term session would go. I’ve been building this site and have added a few posts here or there. But Blaugust allowed me to figure out how to streamline that process because I needed to try to post something every single day.
I feel like I’ve gotten better and faster at the coding side of getting a post out thanks to all the practice I got this month. I also feel like continuing on a static site like this is very viable for my blog now that I’ve really broken it in with daily posting.
I also re-discovered a small sub-set of old blog posts around my earliest months of playing FFXIV that are squirreled away on Tumblr. I’ve already begun to move those over to this blog because I want to archive them here to keep them in a safe location.
I know that I’m going to likely go back to my casual blogging schedule after today. But I’m also going to be working on building out all the missing years of content that aren’t currently available in this blog yet. Now that I am archiving Tumblr posts, that will take me back into the year 2013. So I need to build archives from 2013 on through 2020, where I last left off in building this site.
That’s going to take a while, and I’ve made my peace with it. I just hope by the time Blaugust comes around again, the full archive will be available to read!
Thanks for the comments, thoughts, motivations and fun. Hope to see you around as this site continues to expand both into the future and through archives of the past!