Farewell to Blaugust 2024
Posted on August 31, 2024 by Aywren
Another August has come and gone, and with it, the Blaugust challenge for this year winds down. I like to do a recap post because I feel that helps poor Belghast tally things up for my blogging more easily.
I did complete all 31 posts for this year!
You can see all of my posts on my main blog on the August archive. I also slid one post in on my Fiddle section, since it’s a topic that I’ve been wanting to write about, which you can find here.
In all, that’s 31 posts. I’m not going to lie, I sometimes questioned if I was going to make it every day.
This year was the toughest year I’ve had to date in Blaugust. This was for many reasons:
- I’m already struggling keeping up with my IRL “dailies.” I have a list of tasks that I’m trying to accomplish each day, so fitting more into that was difficult. Once this year is over, I’ll be shaving off a few of these items, which should help with this overburdened feeling.
- I’ve been very casual about blogging this year, partially due to the reason above. To jump back into daily writing was a big ask.
- I had two big projects and deadlines to meet for IRL work this month (one that was completely unexpected). Nuff said.
- While I did write a post about creating a buffer for Blaugust, I did not engage in that as much as I should have to keep myself ahead of the curve.
- I came down with some crud IRL that has just made me super worn out and tired this month. Nothing that made me massively ill, but just enough that my energy level was lower than usual (which already tends to be low).
- HTMLing posts means extra work every day. I wouldn’t trade my HTML site for what I had before, but there’s a cost for time and effort to do it. Even moreso to do it every day.
- I was stretched to find topics to write about this year. I did eventually find enough to cover all the posts, but most of my gaming has been fairly redundant and nothing to write home about lately.
In fact, I’m writing this post on Monday, August 26 – because I decided that for this week, I was just going to push through finishing up all of my buffer early on. I hope to get all of my future posts also pre-coded into the website today as well, which means all I’ll need to do is just code the release for each page for the rest of the week to be done.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not glad to have pushed myself to participate this year, because I am. There’s a number of posts that I wrote that have been on my idea backlog for a while.
I do feel like I’ll be taking a bit of a break as I reorganize some of my habits and priorities for the rest of this year. If anything, this has shown me that I may be biting off more than I can chew when it comes to what I try to do on a daily basis. If I struggle this much to fit in something else, such as writing a blog post, that’s not a great thing.
Anyhow, enough of my retrospective!
If you’ve reached the end of Blaugust, as well, congrats to you! Any posts written are a big win, in my mind, even if you didn’t write every day. I’m sure there’s something you can take away from the experience, too, though it’s likely to be different from my own.
I hope that when it comes around next year, I’ll have freed up more of my time to have better focus on my blog as a whole. I generally have lots of fun with Blaugust, and while I’m not saying I didn’t, I know I didn’t spend as much time exploring other blogs as I’d like to have simply because I was stumbling around keeping up with my own.
Take care and have a great September!