Blaugust – Coding Motivation
Posted on August 17, 2023 by Aywren
Time to talk shop about my progress coding this site – namely, what I’ve done in this month alone, somewhat fueled by the motivation from Blaugust. I’d usually put something like this in my Microblog section (which I’ve also been working very hard on lately), but a post is a post in Blaugust, right?
I’ve been very focused on my blog this month – so much that I’ve accidentally missed out on things (like FFXIV meet ups) that I would have liked to go to. Bummer but… progress is being made!
As I noted in this post earlier this month, moving my WordPress blog here means that I have to hand code each and every post into the templates I use for this site. This can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes (sometimes longer) per post, depending on the complexity (how many images, if it has a video embed, etc.).
I do this month by month. Then, once I’m done with fixing each page within the month, I code a month archive page – which is what you often see me announcing as small archive releases. Each time I finish an entire month, I put it out there.
Some months and years are harder to finish than others.
For example, the years 2015 and 2016 were particularly time consuming because I’d merged two blogs together at the time. I was also experimenting with the concept of microblogging in WordPress, which means I had a bunch of short posts that really should have been relegated to Tweets/Toots on social media, and generally didn’t have a lot of engagement.
Some of these posts, such as the music and video posts, I moved into the Microblog section. Some I straight out deleted since they really didn’t add value to the blog. But all of that took time to sort through.
I’m so happy to say that the 2015 – 2016 era of this blog is now behind me! While some months in 2017 are dense in the number of posts per month, not having to sort through and see if posts are relevant and worth keeping speeds up the process.
I know that 2018 will be the lightest year to code, which is part of the reason I left it to the end. This was partially because halfway through 2018, I started focusing on my FFXIV RP Tumblr blog, and didn’t write as much here.
Blaugust has helped me to buckle down and really focus fire on getting through coding the year 2016, which is huge. This past weekend, I posted the final month of that year, and I’ve already started my dive into coding 2017.
As much as I still don’t regret my choice to undertake this project, I’d love to see this to completion. As I stated before, this takes up so much free time that my normal blogging and my gaming free time are often compromised - not to mention time I could spend on crafts like diamond painting, cross stitch or learning to crochet.
I don’t remember what it was like to not having a huge coding project hovering over my shoulder, to be honest. I do know the sooner I knock it out, the sooner I will have a complete blog, and the sooner I can get that time back for things like my gaming backlog and just having down-time again.
Making progress!