About this blog

Belghast posted the final tally. Wilhelm chimed in. Rakuno as well.
I’m gonna steal the summary (sorry Bel):

• 90 blogs signed up in Blaugust Reborn 2018
• 83 bloggers made at least one post during the month
• We added 1404 new blog posts to the community as a result of Blaugust Reborn
• This equated to an average of 45 new blog posts per day
• 26 Bloggers had 31 posts during the month or in a few cases considerably more

 

So it’s official now, and I’m pretty happy. I’m usually not one to value awards or official recognition, but this was a goal I set for myself. I’m usually bad at achieving any goals that include doing something daily (except brushing my teeth, sadly the time for recognizing this as an achievement is gone for a few decades already), but I managed to do this one!

Hooray, we did it! We made it through 1 (or 31, or any number in between) posts in the month of August! Congrats Blaugustians new and old!
I don’ have much to say, so this is purely a statistics meta post:

• 31 consecutive posts in August
• exactly one post per “day”, as in sleep cycle. Two or three came 1-2h after midnight, but before I went to bed.
• so I think I’ll get a “Rainbow Diamond Award”, yay!
• as I started in July, this makes 42 consecutive days with one post per day each
• including this post, I wrote 10463 words (subtract 50 for emoticons I guess, this wasn’t scientific counting)
• the average post length was 349 words
• the median post length was 262 words
• the longest post was 1043 words
• the shortest post was 106 words, so even for whatever threshold you use, I wouldn’t say I cheated
• WordPress says I had 551 visitors, which is more than 10 times the normal amount. Thanks for reading 🙂
• 43 comments, oh wow! (I guess nearly half of them were me responding though)
• even though I was away on vacation for a few days… it wasn’t two weeks, so scheduling in advance worked fine
• I’m not sick of posting, so I might continue for a bit, but latest mid-September I’ll have to take some time off anyway

This week’s theme is “Staying Motivated Week” and that’s kinda bad for me, because I’m still 100% motivated, I’m just content-starved 😛
I know this blog is a mix of me journalling my exploits in games, sometimes bragging about my meager achievements, and some random rambling – but as you noticed this is hardly a blog about my life outside of gaming – I wrote such a blog for years, elsewhere. Maybe it’s refreshing to just being able to focus on one (very broad) topic, maybe it has to do with not posting with my real name. To be fair I’d say I’m still telling friends on IRC and Discord and Messengers enough of my daily life that I could as well be still blogging. That would at least provide ample material for a daily post, not just for a month, but longer. I really like what Belghast is doing – although it’s not daily daily anymore, to me that’s still one of the most high-frequency blogs I know, but I didn’t run the number, maybe Syp and Wilhelm are close or even ahead. I’m checking their feeds daily if I have time, and in the winter, when not commuting by bike, those 3 are probably my first blogs to check. For once the time zones are not all bad, because I can read their “yesterday” post on my morning commute. But just because I’ve read them for years that doesn’t mean they’re exclusive. This Blaugust I’ve noticed a few people I’ll definitely put on my daily list – and a ton of others that will move to my regular “Games” category. Also time and time again I find it fascinating that there are some people I can have awesome discussions on Discord but their writing style and/or topics just don’t fit me well, sorry folks – I’m nearly as finicky with blogs as I am with podcasts, so please don’t take it personally.
Anyway, Blaugust went very well and now it’s just the home stretch of four days. I’m not sure if it was mostly “I’m taking up this challenge and want to finish with the Rainbow Diamond Award” or, more likely, the Discord was awesome and everyone was chiming in, asking questions, answering questions, and talking about life, the universe, and everything (wow, that was an oxford comma’d oxford comma sentence, is this even legal?).
 
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my twenty-seventh post.

Half of the month is over and so far I managed to post daily. Most days it was easy, but I’m in a phase of playing games on a daily basis, which is not the norm.
Some days I was really glad I had a handful of drafts prepared, some days had filler posts I’d never make without the daily challenge I set for myself. At least I never forgot to post (had one scheduling fail where I typo’d the day, doh), but I posted just after midnight a few times before I went to bed. I dated those back to 23:59, that’s the amount of slack I’m allowing myself. Ald wrote something similar and I agree, I won’t force myself to post after August and be back to a highly irregular schedule.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my seventeenth post.
PPS: I typed this on my phone on the subway and it’s outrageous how much better autocomplete is in English over German on Android.

This week is Get to Know Each Other Week at Blaugust, and I had this page draft I wanted to publish for a while, so I just did that. Because it’s nearly midnight, I got in some gaming time today, but overall got up too early, came home too late and so I’m posting a draft, still going strong with one post per day 🙂
This page called Gaming History (which I will not reproduce here) shows a list of games I played and that I either think worth mentioning at the time, or which just had such a big impact that I wanted to write down when I started playing them (not necessarily when I stoppped).
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my ninth post.

Came in later for work today because I had to run some errands in the morning, took a longer lunch break and then stayed an hour longer to finish something. That’s why I got out only just before 20:00 and that’s when the shops close. I had originally planned to grab something on the way home, but I wasn’t too hungry anyway so I skipped dinner.
That’s not the dilemma though, it’s that there’s like 50 new blog posts to read because all the Blaugust participants are eagerly writing. Reading blog posts takes time. That means I don’t really have time to play games tonight I guess (did half an hour of Dead Cells and then gave up for the night again), and so I have nothing to write about. What a dilemma. #firstworldproblems
But this week is Topic Brainstorming Week and I guess that’s not my cup of tea anyway. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% not creative, but I’m usually reacting instead of acting when writing things. I’m good at correcting stuff (short things and longer things like theses), I’m not good at producing any kind of text that’s not stream-of-consciousness blogging or chiming in on a topic with an opinion. And boy do I have opinions about stuff 🙂
At least I managed to write a proper post for tomorrow already, because I won’t be home and so far I don’t want to break my streak.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my second post.

People are different, so of course browsing habits are different as well, some preferably use their smart phones (I don’t), some use laptops or desktop machines. I suppose people playing video games are still mostly in the last camp although I’ve seen some impressive gaming laptops recently. But I digress, some people have a list of links to blogs they click through daily or weekly, some just type in the URLs, but many people use so-called RSS-Feeds to keep up with new posts on various websites, very often blogs.
To quote Wikipedia:

RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.

There are several RSS readers for desktop and mobile use, and a lot of websites that do this, for example Feedbin or Feedly or many others. I use Tiny Tiny RSS that I host on my own server.
Anyway, should you be interested in following all the participants of Blaugust Reborn this year, I created an OPML file (explanation) that you should be able to import into your feed-reader of choice. I will try to update it every few days at least, so you might want to add the latest participants manually. There’s also a plain TXT with the feeds.
If this doesn’t make sense at all, feel free to hit me up on Discord or comment for further explanation and how I can persuade you to love RSS 🙂

Maybe you shouldn’t take advice from someone with an average of two page views per post, but then again this is not a highly promoted blog.
I also don’t have a lot of advice, that others didn’t put more eloquently, but there’s a few things I want to mention.
 

The name your website/blog versus your domain name

See, this blog is hosted at armagon.wordpress.com – but nowadays I’m mostly going by Nogamara, except my twitter handle is still @Armagon – it’s not hard to google where the name came from, it’s also kinda an obscure reference, and I still have a toon in most MMOs by that name, but as it wasn’t original enough, I chose to mostly go by Nogamara (I also have that twitter handle) – but I won’t change the blog name. This might be a bad idea, but I don’t care. So my advice: Unless you plan to stick to your nick/handle for ages (and I do mean ages, I’ve used one nick at age 15-17, one from 17 until 27 and another one since then, and this is all just outside of gaming circles…) circumstances might change and either you want to be well-known and findable on the interwebs or you want to hide your juvenile mistakes by changing nicks at some point 🙂
Anyway. In ancient (for the internet) times Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that Tim Berners-Lee) wrote “Cool URIs don’t change” and because I’m an old fart I’m still sticking to that. So I’d rather change not change my domain name. If you want to, that’s your choice of course. Remember that it’s your website, your blog, your content. Unless someone’s paying you, do what you want unless you’re in other people’s faces. I’m just trying to encourage you to leave your old website (especially if it’s still relevant content like game reviews, guides, etc.) online (that’s where a free web host comes in handy) and not delete it. Yes, do as I say, not do as I do. I now (nearly 9 years later) wish I had come up with a cooler name. My original WoW Rogue blog was called “Vanish!” – also very narrow, but not totally off. Not a great name for a general blog either.

Interaction with other people

This is not my first blog and probably won’t be me last. On this one I’ve only had like 99% positive interactions with people, so apparently I was either flying under the radar, not posting very opinionated content, or something else. Keep in mind you might at some point write something controversial and then it gets linked on Twitter or Reddit and some Trolls are coming your way. Don’t let them drag you down. Don’t hesitate to moderate and block them or at least ignore them. Feel free to discuss but don’t take any attacks personal.

Commitments

If you want to blog a lot, go ahead! Blaugust is cool because you have other people around and it can be encouraging to read more posts, participate in discussions that take place in long form content instead of comments, and get to interact with other bloggers. If you don’t feel like posting, don’t despair though. If you signed up ready to try to get 31 posts going in August and feel you can’t make it – it’s fine. The Gold(25), Silver (15), Bronze(5) and Newbie (just starting a blog) Awards are fine, too. Do it for fun! Sure, you can take some of the bloggers who are writing daily or every week day as an example, but it takes practice for some people. It’s absolutely not the norm to be able to come up with a post every day. I certainly can’t sustain this for very long, I just have a chatty phase the last 2 weeks. I can absolutely not predict how long it will last, so my goal is Bronze and I’m overjoyed if I reach Silver. Sure, I could’ve just saved some of my last 10 posts for August, but this is my blog and if I write for 11 days until the 31st and then stop I’m a good target for ridicule – but I’ve been writing these last 2 weeks because I wanted to.