What I've Learned Over National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) 2019

Today is the last day of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), and I've managed to write 32 posts in 30 days!

I thought I'd reflect on how I've found the month, and whether I've been able to more easily crank out posts.

Breakdown of tags per post over the NaBloPoMo 2019
TagNumber of posts
nablopomo32
blogumentation13
www.jvt.me8
command-line5
ruby3
indieweb3
certificates3
personal3
minify-json2
json2
git2
hugo2
thoughts2
openssl2
nodejs1
job-dsl1
jenkins1
pretty-print1
yaml1
privacy1
neurodiversity1
security1
golang1
jekyll1
static-site-generator1
reader-mail1
python1
webmention1
jsonfeed1
gitlab1
workflow1
music1
personal-website1
rfc1
events1
meetup.com1
getting-started1
emacs1
vim1
netlify1
banking1
monzo1
gousto1
cooking1
chefspec1
chef1
licensing1
open-source1
free-software1
self-care1
mental-health1
blogging1
retrospective1

As we can see, a large percentage of the posts are blogumentation-related, which is good because it shows in the month I've learned a lot of things that I have documented for posterity! I've also made a fair few changes to this site, as I've blogged about them under the tag www.jvt.me.

When sharing my posts Sending Webmentions More Intelligently, Ditching Event Platforms for the IndieWeb and Adulting: The Constant Struggle of Prioritisation on various platforms, I've received quite a bit of engagement which was nice.

I've found that of the 30+ posts I've done this month, only 3-4 of them have been posts that I've had on my backlog for some time, which is both good because it's meant I've blogged about new things, but as I have 72 articles in my backlog it would've been nice to get some of them done as they'll hopefully be helpful for some else hence me wanting to write them.

I've also still got, at time of writing, another 16 posts to write for NaBloPoMo, which I felt would would fit the time and size constraints for the month, but didn't get around to writing.

I find it pretty difficult to force content and be productive when I'm not in the mindset for it (as I spoke about in Revert 'Some knowledge-sharing news' when I cancelled my training courses with Packt). It's been not helped by going through bereavement, but I feel it has also made it easier as it's been giving me a nice constant and an outlet to focus on.

In the past I've found I'm able to push out articles when they're either blogumentation or it's something that I need to get published. Although I've written a tonne, it's often ad-hoc, not on a strict schedule. I guess this has shown that I can write on a schedule but I don't really enjoy it. Life is quite busy and I feel pretty exhausted by this last month, aside from everything else life-related going on.

I've generally written posts that take ~2 minutes to read, and have maybe taken ~20-30 minutes to write and review, although a few others have taken a bit longer as I've been thinking about what I want to write.

I've written a couple of posts before the day they've been published, but that's more because I've known that day was going to be very busy and I'd struggle to post. But on the flip-side, it's also meant that I've felt I'm forced to only publish one post a day, which is a pain, because yesterday I had a ideas for five posts. I ended up writing a couple late last night, but still, it's a shame that I've felt I've not been able to (for some imaginary reasons, yes) deliver timely content if I wanted to.

I may see if in 2020 I'll start to write at least one post a week, giving myself a soft schedule and allow me to write ad-hoc if I need to.

And just a note here that I know I haven't needed to blog all month. I realise that it's purely my own choice, and forcing myself to write lots has been to see if I can and how it feels, but I've known that I don't have to publish anything if I don't feel up to it.

And finally, I've found it quite difficult because I've wanted to spend time with Anna and Morph and play Apex Legends.

I'm looking forward to going back to being able to blog at leisure, and especially looking forward to the Nottingham Tech Community Christmas Party on Monday.

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#nablopomo #blogging #retrospective.

Syndication

This post will be syndicated to these sites:

This post was filed under articles.

Has this content helped you? Please consider supporting me so I can continue to create content like this!

This post is part of the series nablopomo-2019.

Related Posts

Other posts you may be interested in:

Interactions with this post

Interactions with this post

Below you can find the interactions that this page has had using WebMention.

Have you written a response to this post? Let me know the URL:

Do you not have a website set up with WebMention capabilities? You can use Comment Parade.