Blaugust

Good Morning Friends! It is that time again for another Blaugust, or at least it will be very soon. Several years ago I started challenging my blogging friends to post something new each day during the month of August. Over the years this concept has morphed and changed as needed but remained as a focus of trying to stir up bloggers. Blogging has been called a dying art many many times in the press, but there are many of us who keep doing it and have been doing it for over a decade. The hope is with each Blaugust that we might spur some lax bloggers back into action and also spread the art form to a new generation. There is something deeply therapeutic about scribbling down a bunch of words and sending them out into the world for others to read.

Why We Do Blaugust

The “why” of Blaugust is relatively straightforward. The blogging community is nowhere near as large as it once was. Many of us have aged out of blogging with real-world responsibilities and others have just moved on to other time-consuming hobbies. Blaugust gives us a chance to infuse the community with a fresh lease on life as we court new bloggers to join the fray. Those of us who have been carrying the torch of blogging for decades now can sometimes lose hope as our blogroll loses a few voices each year. I personally find getting out and mingling with other bloggers to be a deeply beneficial thing when it comes to my own creative processes. We’ve also branched out to support others who do serialized content in any format, the focus being on regularly engaging with the creative process. The bustling Discord Community has helped to keep the energy up the other eleven months of the year.

The Base Game

This year we are shifting things up a little bit to make it more clear what is required and what is purely optional content. Blaugust at its heart has always been about celebrating the creation of content on a regular schedule. The original challenge was to post 31 times during the month of August which is 31 days long. This can be posting every day or doubling up on some days to make the schedule a bit easier. However, we also want to award anyone who starts down this path, because deciding to blog in the first place is a victory in itself. As such we give out awards based on the number of posts that you manage to knock out during the month of August.

• Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
• Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2022.
• Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2022.
• Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2022.
• Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2022.

The Expansion

Something new that we are introducing this year is the concept of Blaugchievements. Essentially anything from this point forward should be considered optional and will be considered to also be on the “honor system”. There have always been a number of assorted trappings associated with Blaugust like a schedule with specific weeks called out for various purposes. Additionally, some years back we made a pretty ill-fated attempt at doing a shared topic web ring. These concepts are moving forward but being packaged up as extra achievements for those who wish to go through the additional effort.

Each individual Blaugchievement has its own associated achievement “toast” patterned loosely after those from Xbox Live back in the day. By reading this blog post you have already heard the very first one. You can view the extended list of Blaugchievements where I explain each of them in detail, but here is a short version of the list.

• Reading the Manual – Read the introductory blog post with the rules of the event.
• Joining the Cause – Sign-Up for Blaugust.
• Recruit a Friend – Convince another blogger to participate in Blaugust.
• Spreading the Madness – Promote Blaugust on your blog or through your social media of choice.
• Friend of Wumpus – Join the Blaugust Discord.
• Sharing is Caring – Post your content in the “Share Your Content” Channel.
• Forum of Friends – Take part in a discussion in the “Post Discussion” Channel.
• The Pet Tax – Post a picture of an animal friend on the “Stuff and Things” Channel.
• Friend Like Me – Answer a question posted on the Blagust Discord or help out a new blogger.
• Shared Thoughts – Comment on a blog post from another Blaugust participant.
• Getting Inspired – Write a blog post inspired by a post from another Blaugust participant.
• Pickup Group – Play a game or take part in an activity with one or more Blaugust participants.
• Hot Topics – Write a blog post based on the Blaugust Prompt List.
• Welcome Wagon – Write a blog post based on the first week’s theme of Welcoming Folks to Blaugust.
• Introduce Yourself – Write a blog post based on the second week’s theme of Introducing Yourself.
• Creative Appreciation – Write a blog post based on the third week’s theme Appreciating the works of some Creative or Company.
• Staying Motivated – Write a blog post based on the fourth week’s theme of how you have managed to Stay Motivated.
• Lessons Learned – Write a blog post based on the fifth week’s theme explaining some of the Lessons you have Learned through Blaugust.
• Going Platinum – Complete All of the Blaugchievements for Blaugust 2022.

The Schedule

As is often the case with Blaugust, we have a series of “themed” weeks. This is a purely optional feature and designed to help give folks some scaffolding the shape their ideas, and not something strict. August has five weeks and as such we have five different themes.

• Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 6th) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
• Introduce Yourself Week (August 7th – August 13th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
• Creative Appreciation Week (August 14th – August 20th) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
• Staying Motivated Week (August 21st – August 27th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
• Lessons Learned Week (August 28th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

The Prompts

As hinted at earlier in this post, in 2020 we tried something a little different and created this whole “promptapalooza” event since we had already done the traditional Blaugust style event as Blapril that year. It was honestly a bit of a failure. I am not sure what it looked like from the outside, but trying to keep that event running was sheer chaos as no one seemed to grok the concept. The good thing that came out of it however is that we have a pretty nice list of prompts for those who might need help trying to come up with something to write about during this month. Again this is a purely optional thing but there is a Blaugchievement associated with it.

• Blaugust Prompt List

Mentorship

One of the benefits of having done this at least once in this same style… is that we have existing infrastructure! We already have a batch of mentors ready to help the process, but if you feel like you would be best served in that role we are always open to more. Ultimately mentors should have at least two years of blogging experience under their belt in order to gauge the ebbs and flow of content creation in front of a live studio audience. We aren’t expecting perfection, just a willingness to share the lessons you have learned along the way with fledgling participants. If this sounds like you, please reach out to me on Discord and we can talk about your desire to become a Mentor.

The Details

That my friends are the details for Blaugust 2022. There have been a few tweaks here or there, but largely it should function in a similar fashion. As is always the case I close out the yearly information post with a quick bullet point rundown of the information.

• The Sign-Up Form for Blaugust 2022 can be found here. Since logging in with a Google account has been a source of consternation for some, I have removed that functionality. If you still cannot for whatever reason sign-up but want to participate please let me know. Only those that I am tracking will be assigned awards.
• The invite link to the Blaugust Discord can be found here. Participation in Discord is entirely optional but also a great way to bounce ideas off the existing community.
• If you feel inclined to do so please use the hashtag #Blaugust2022 for tracking purposes and to make your content easier to find for those watching the proceedings.
  • We also highly suggest that you utilize the Share Your Content” channel in the official Discord.
• Mingle with the participants of Blaugust 2022. Get out and see the blogs, read the posts, and comment frequently! These folks represent a social structure that you can lean on for advice in the coming years. I deeply value the ties I have made with other bloggers and started this process as an attempt to cement those and build new ones.
• If you are so inclined there is a “Gaming Together” channel on Discord for those impromptu grouping activities. I believe there was even some discussion of doing a one-shot D&D adventure this year.
• If you find yourself getting stuck at any point feel free to rely on the weekly schedule or the prompt list for inspiration or you can hop on Discord and talk through your issues.
• You can also check out the new Blaugchievements list for anything that might spark your creativity and check one of those off.
• Welcome to Blaugust 2022. As always if you have any questions please feel free to ask. My door is always open but I might be slow to respond because I have a bad habit of idling on pretty much all the social platforms at once.
• If you want an archive of all of the various logos and such from this year or past years of Blagust, please check out the Blaugust Media Kit page.

Hey Folks! It is almost Blaugust time. No this is not the new logo but it was the only one I could grab on the fly from my archives that did not have an implicit year associated with it. The new logo is still a work in progress, as is most of the stuff that would go into the big rules and sign-up posts. However, I thought I would do things a little differently this year. I more or less cobbled together Blaugust each year as a “thing I do” that the community also does with me, but this time around I am asking for some feedback.

What Do You Want From Blaugust?

It is a simple enough question. What are you expecting from the Blaugust experience, and what sorts of things do you hope to participate in? Each year I follow a pretty similar script, and each year I have folks who are confused by the rules or expect them to be way more strict than they actually are. I have some ideas on how to resolve that confusion or attempt to resolve it. However, I thought I would start this whole pre-Blaugust discussion out by just asking what you as a participant are expecting to get from the experience.

What Worked Well in Past Blaugusts?

If you have participated in Blaugust before, or merely lurked… what seemed to work well? What aspects of it did you enjoy? What aspects of the proceedings did you want to see more of? I get that this is a bit weird as far as blog posts go, but essentially I am soliciting feedback before I lock this year’s rules in stone.

What Did Not Work Well?

Now we have the opposite side of that coin. What did not work well, and what do you feel could have been improved upon? I can’t guarantee that your feedback is going to change the course of the past year’s proceedings, but I am curious what aspects did not go as well as they could have. Essentially I want to know what did not land as well as it could have, so that maybe with some tweaking I can prevent that from happening again. Blaugust is very much a free-form experience, and I don’t think I will be playing more of a camp director role going forward, but if there are things that we can change to make things work more smoothly in this self-directed manner then I am all about that.

As it stands right now I do not expect to be posting my “launch” topic until at least next week, but I am in the process of firming up material for the coming run of Blaugust. You can of course post your feedback in the comment section below. Also, I am pretty widely reachable through various direct message platforms if what you want to say is in a more sensitive manner. Lastly, if you crave more real-time interaction for this discussion and feedback from other voices there is always the Post Discussion channel in the Blaugust Discord. This is the first time I have really asked for feedback during the entire process of running Blaugust so we will see how this goes.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and also to the upcoming Blaugust 2022.

Hey Friends! We did it! We made it through another August and with that another Blaugust. We had a pretty solid turnout this year with forty-five participants making at least one new blog post during the month. During this one month, we introduced the world to nine hundred and eighty-one new blog posts, which seems like a pretty big success to me. More interesting though is that this seems to have rekindled the fires in a few latent bloggers that I am happy to see back in the fold. Ultimately that is the part of Blaugust that gets lost in the mix, that it is a festival of blogging and that maybe just maybe it will prove to people that they can post on a schedule… then figure out whatever schedule actually works for them. While Nait somewhat disagrees with me about it, I personally do think that setting a schedule helped me to keep this blog active over the years.

However, you are likely not here this morning to listen to me wax on about blogging to a schedule but are instead here for the unveiling of the awards. As always I give the disclaimer that I am sometimes bad at math, and if I somehow missed a post here or there, let me know and I will correct the record. First let’s take a moment to review the definition of each award.

• Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You created a new blog and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
• Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2021.
• Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2021.
• Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2021.
• Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted 31 or more posts during the month of August 2021.

Newbie Class of 2021

Bronze Club 2021

Silver Club 2021

Gold Club 2021

Rainbow Diamond Club 2021

Honorable Mentions

We had a number of bloggers who for one reason or another didn’t make those five posts in order to qualify for bronze, but I feel like it is important to give them some recognition for putting themselves out there in the first place.

• Zapp – Leeterati – 1 posts
• Alli – The Parent Trope – 3 posts
• everwake – Everwakes Adventures – 3 posts
• Kluwes – Many Welps – 3 posts
• Ashgar – Ashs Adventures – 4 posts

Final Thoughts

One of the things I have done in past years is to post some statistics, so let’s begin this section by mirroring the items tracked during 2019, which was effectively the last “normal” Blaugust. In 2020 we had Blapril instead and a much shorter and more low-key Blagust.

• 981 posts were made by Blaugust 2021 Participants
• 45 Individuals Participated in the event and made at least one post
• 2 Newbie Bloggers Participated and both made 31 posts
• 40 out of the 45 participating made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze
• 31 out of the 45 participating made at elast 15 posts qualifying for Silver
• 23 out of the 45 participating made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold
• 20 blogers made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond

It is a smaller year than some of those in the past, but it is also a year where the community is recovering from the state of the world right now. I talked about it yesterday, but we no longer have Stropp and Psychochild with us and both participated in Blagusts past. I am extremely proud of those who participated or even thought about participating. It takes a lot to put yourselves out there, and I am hoping as we keep this institution rolling that it will gain traction with entirely new audiences. My wife runs her own Blaugust mirrored after ours, and it did not happen this year because it was just too much stress on their community. So the fact that we managed to make it happen and be extremely successful is a testament to you all.

As always if I have made some errors in my calculations, please get with me and I will sort it out. Additionally, if you want the full-sized version of the awards to use on your blog, you can find them on the Blaugust Media Kit page. Thanks so much for participating, and I will as always see you for Blaugust 2022.

Good morning friends! I am feeling better this morning, or better enough to actually be interactive and mostly functional. Right now we have this weird thing happening in Oklahoma that is a perfect reminder that as a state we just get the weather patterns that are left over from the rest of the country. The air is filled with smoke from fires but said fires are happening in Canada and the Pacific Northwest but the current wind patterns are causing it to hang over the middle of the country. As a fairly severe asthmatic and one that is particularly susceptible to smoke, it has been destroying my lungs. For reference in 2005, there was a house fire down the street and that was enough exposure to send me to the hospital for five days. Yesterday was a day of rest and lots of Benedryl to try and halt the allergic reaction causing my lungs to stop functioning.

The results are that I feel more like a human being, but yesterday was not so much. As a result without really meaning to, I made the tactical decision just not to worry about blogging. I made a comment on Twitter given that the largest chunk of my vocal readers have a presence there where I sheepishly half apologized for not posting.

It felt strange that the key proprietor of Blaugust was taking a day off during the running of the event. I was rapidly presented with a chorus of my friends telling me that it was perfectly okay to take time off from blogging and that maybe it was a good lesson to present to younger bloggers. So here we are this morning with a post I did not intend to write on a subject I did not think to cover. The thing is… my friends are completely correct. Your health and wellbeing are far more important than maintaining a schedule. As a result, Uncle Bel is going to tell you a story.

The Grand Experiment

I am going to be completely honest with you, but right now my legacy in blogging seems to be the fact that I am more prolific than most. I am not necessarily known for the quality of my posts, but instead the quantity of them. Sure there are true daily bloggers that completely clean my clock when it comes to posting count, but people keep returning because I have things to say and keep saying them. This was not always the case and in fact, for the first four years of this blog, I was extremely irregular in my posting patterns. In 2013 I decided I wanted to change this and proposed what I then called The Grand Experiment where I force myself to sit down every morning and write something. The idea was simple enough, that not every blog post needed to be this epic tale and there could be straightforward “day in the life” style posts along the way.

In that first year, I made a total of 257 blog posts, which was over a hundred more than I had made to that point in the first four years of blogging. The more I wrote the easier it became to summon forth something to talk about, and honestly the more the barriers lowered in talking about my real life. I had always tried to keep my readers at arm’s length and never really talk about anything that I was going through. When you are blogging every day it becomes exceptionally hard to do that, and bits and pieces of my real life came through in this new journal format. Thing is, years after the fact I am very glad that I opened up because I can now use my blog as a way of determining when exactly which events happened in my life.

The Double Edged Sword

The challenge with blogging every day is that it becomes extremely difficult to stop blogging. You feel like you are a failure if you miss a day and for three and a half years I managed to crank out something new every single morning. There were a lot of days that I did not want to make a post and probably would have been better off not making one. The thing is I didn’t want to let that ball drop so I keep juggling and eventually reached this place where I felt like I needed to purposefully drop it in order to keep my own sanity. I’ve been so good about marking the passing of specific milestones, that I find it funny this morning I had to search for the exact point when I purposefully broke the streak. The history of daily blogging was looming over me and it felt like pressure pushing down on my shoulders. My ultimate fear was that if I did not break it on my own… I would potentially have a longer break when burnout finally caught up with me.

Instead of daily blogging, I shifted over to a format of blogging every weekday, which gave me a bit of a break on the weekends to recharge my batteries. The truth is I actually landed on a format where I took Saturday off because Sunday ended up being a quick posting of that weeks AggroChat which was more or less a required thing. In general, this was enough of a break to make me feel less pressured to keep things going. Even then however there are days when I just can’t bring myself to post like yesterday, and I need to be better about giving myself room to allow those days to happen. I did start out yesterday feeling like a bit of a failure for not summoning forth a blog post, but my friends came to the rescue and dispelled that myth.

Give Yourself Breathing Room

So while I absolutely think setting a schedule for yourself and sticking with it is a key trait in blogging, you do have to give yourself a bit of wiggle room. I am a daily blogger of a sort, but I give myself the leverage to determine which days I actually make posts. I try and follow a weekdays format, but occasionally there is going to be a day where that just doesn’t work. Yesterday I was sick, other days in the past I have been too busy at work or just didn’t feel like I had anything to add. Those days are okay and natural and it is important to let yourself have a break every now and then. Blogging is about the marathon and not the sprint. Ultimately we want you to be a voice that is around for the long haul and not someone that is going to be super active and then disappear forever. Breaks I think are key to that longevity.