Two Posts from the End

Life Got In the Way

While my daily blogging routine is set in stone now and I am absolutely unshakable in my devotion… my whole keeping tabs on the Blaugust event apparently wasn’t.  As a result I had managed to get massively behind in reading all of the blog posts and crediting them in my Google Drive spreadsheet.  I am not sure if I will be running this event again in the future, but if I do I will have to engineer something more manageable for keeping track of whether or not someone had posted during that day.  As the contest went on I stopped being quite so strict as to account for people posting in a different time zone than say their blog is configured.  I noticed a lot of double posts on one day, and then occasional lapses.  I finally reasoned this out to be someone posting after midnight, and quite frankly I didn’t feel like being that hardcore about the requirements.

Additionally I am making a executive decision and counting Wow In the Details among the grand prize contestants instead of as somehow a contestant with an asterisk.  They started one day late but have since double and triple posted several days to make up for it, and since they have not broken the posting pattern at all…  I just can’t in good faith hold them behind for starting a single day late.  Since I am being loose on the whole posting after midnight thing… I didn’t feel like I could hold her to somehow being excluded from the grand prizes for starting a single day late… when she has not dropped a day since.  In a future running of the contest I would hope to have some sort of self serve / honor system that allowed folks to tick off a post when they make it.  The Nook thing is great for having all of the posts in one place, but no better for tracking than anything else.

Two Posts From the End

At this point I see two distinct camps among the participants.  There is one group that has enjoyed the challenge and the motivation to post more.  Then there is another group that feels like they have committed to something but later wished they had not.  In any case at this point we have a long list of people “winning” the competition already by continuing to post daily.  I have to say how massively proud I am of you all, especially the folks who either started their blogs for Blaugust or came from the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I originally intended this to be mostly a thing for Veteran bloggers, a way to inspire them to ratchet up their posting frequency and be willing to most more “off the cuff” topics.  What I did not expect was just how many participants we would have.  At last count I believe we have 52 total blogs that are competing in the contest and of those 29 are currently in the running for the spoils of victory.

If you see your name in the above list, then you should pat yourself on the back for making it this far.  If you don’t see your name in the list, you should still pat yourself on the back for participating.  It has been amazing to sit back and watch as this whole thing unfolded around me.  I never expected to gain the amount of traction that it has, nor did I expect quite so many people to be vying for the finish line.  I have met several new faces through this process, and I believe there has been a lot of time mingling among the various writers participating.  The challenge now is to take this momentum that we have here and keep it going through the rest of the year.  I am not suggesting that each of you adopt my schedule of daily blogging forever… but hopefully you’ve proved to yourself that you can do it.  If you can do daily posting, you can easily cut back to a every other day schedule.  It is up to you to figure out what exactly fits your time and desires, but I encourage you to find a schedule of some sort.

The Finish Line

Now for some final business details as we stare down at the finish line.  Firstly, if you are on this list make sure I have some form of contact information for you.  That means you either need to be following my twitter, my anook, my steam, or have arranged some other method for me to contact you.  On September 1st I will be rolling the dice to determine who wins all of the prizes I mentioned in the announcement post.  For sake of novelty, I plan on using actual dice 2D10 or percentage dice as they are often known.  As a programmer and a gamer I have learned not to trust random number generators.  My goal is to use a dice cup to remove my own influence from the rolls as well.  The most important thing however is that you check the spreadsheet to make sure I have given you full credit for all of your posts… especially if you are NOT on the above list but believe you should be.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in making this an interesting month.

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