Endgame Viable

It’s the last day of Blaugust 2026. I don’t really want to write a “how my Blaugust went” post, because everybody’s writing them, but I don’t have any other ideas for the last day.

I did successfully post 31 posts in 31 days, so I can still do that, for whatever that’s worth. Once I abandoned the idea of actually writing a new post every morning, it was pretty easy. It didn’t even take that much of my time.

Well, it was less easy in the final week or so, as I had completely jettisoned all interest in blogging from my mind. I only kept posting out of a misguided sense of sunk cost fallacy.

The gaming competitor in me can’t help but note that posting once a day is nowhere near enough to “win” a Blaugust competition anymore. (The most posts win, right?) I notice that a lot of the IndieWeb folks tend to publish blog posts like they’re writing tweets or microblogs, so they’ll put out four or five paragraph-long posts in a day.

I could never do that, because there’s too much metadata required for each post, and it would quickly become too high of a ratio of work-to-fun.

I consider the “publishing” part of blogging to be the most time-consuming, least fun part. Which I take to include editing, formatting, thinking of titles, finding images, and picking tags. This year, that part didn’t take that long, thanks to a bunch of helpers I concocted.

The actual “writing” part of blogging is no big deal for me, and it’s usually something I do as a normal part of my every day.

A major question for me is what to do now that Blaugust is over.

I like the idea of posting more frequent, more focused, shorter posts. So I’ll probably try that for a while.

Statistically speaking, Blaugust didn’t really do much for me. When you weed out all the bots and RSS hits, there was a very clear trend downward in views per post over the course of the month.

The main thing I learned from the event is that I’m not cut out to sit down and write a post every morning. I knew that already, but I wanted to try it out anyway. But most of the time, there’s nothing to talk about, and then you’re stuck writing a “there’s nothing to talk about” post which is just a waste of effort.

So why do I blog?

I don’t feel much compulsion to mentor the world with explanations for everything I’m doing. I don’t feel like being a “thought leader.” I find a lot of thought leaders are… how shall I put this… wrong about things? Not worth emulating? Not always, but enough that it’s a relatively safe bet.

Much of what I want to accomplish with my blog is a sort of running memoir. A record of my life, or at least the parts that I don’t mind talking about. I reminder of what I did in the past.

Okay the work day’s over and I don’t have any more excuses for putting off writing the end of this post.

What’s it all mean? I think there’s supposed to be some kind of philosophical conclusion to be drawn from this month’s experience, but I can’t be bothered to think of one.

At this moment I can’t imagine doing another daily Blaugust like this. I’m definitely going to turn into a “once a week maybe” blogger from here. There’s just no upside to blogging daily, other than the “challenging yourself” aspect, which gets old pretty fast.

My cat is now trying to sit in my lap so that’s another convenient excuse to postpone the end of this post.

Oh here’s one new thing I learned: I get the most referrals from Google blogs. I don’t know why. But it’s very clearly there in the stats.

And I think that’s probably good enough. A last gasp of written content for the end of Blaugust, stumbling over the finish line to crash into a water table and twist an ankle.