August 31, 2021

Blaugust 2021 Lessons Learned

Well kids, what did we learn this month?

Writing a blog post from scratch every morning is hard work.

Publishing a blog post every day is hard work.

Finding pictures to put into blog posts is hard work.

Manually pasting links to your posts in Twitter and Discord is hard work which crosses the line into abusive labor practices and I refuse to do it. That’s what RSS is for.

Reading a lot of blog posts in a month is hard work. Especially when your vision isn’t that great.

Figuring out how to write comments on a million different blogs is exceptionally hard work.

Uploading videos to YouTube every day and writing a blog post every day is way too much hard work.

But I kind of knew all that already. For my own quirky off-brand blog, I learned:

It’s so much easier to write blog text in a text editor than it is with the WordPress editor, but it’s harder to add pictures. And the Visual Studio Code spellchecker is hit-or-miss at best. And it’s still a pain to add links into blog posts. So much alt-tabbing and copy-and-paste. Yuck.

I still can’t figure out an easily-maintainable way to put comment functionality into a static blog. I had some hope for Remark42. Now I’m looking into Utterances, but I doubt anybody is going to want to authenticate through GitHub. Authentication is always the sticking point for comments.

I meant to update the RSS link in my template but I never did, even though I thought to do it about fourteen different times throughout the month.

Moving pictures around the various computers on my local network isn’t very efficient.

Writing blog posts on any of the computers or laptops on my local network isn’t very convenient, my blog mostly “lives” on one PC. I need to make it more distributed.

I need a tool that watches my own RSS feed and performs actions when new posts are detected.

In terms of ongoing blog narratives over the month:

I completed Final Fantasy XV, but I haven’t yet completed Final Fantasy XIII, because The Stupid Face Boss wrecked my enthusiasm for that game. (You just know there are going to be worse bosses later.)

I finished the base Shadowbringers expansion, but decided to go easy on the endgame grind and focus instead on replaying A Realm Reborn, because offhand I can’t think of any better games to play at the moment.

I didn’t do any of the plans I set out to do before Blaugust. Not even once.

I accidentally committed a draft post that I didn’t intend to, so there’s an extra hidden easter egg of a post out there for the month.

Congrats to all the Blaugusters! You’re all winners! I guess? Yes, probably. No, definitely! I’m not very good at cheerleading. The world is a dark and terrible place, you know.

Anyway, you can find my Blaugust 2021 posts here. You can find all my Blaugust posts throughout history here, assuming I remembered to tag the posts correctly.

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