WeblogPoMo 2024 Wrap-Up

May 31, 2024

I was a bit late joining the WeblogPoMo train, having only announced I was doing it on the 2nd. I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit. Before starting, I assumed I’d have to skip some days — but I didn’t! Because of a post on the last day of April (and including this post), I’ve updated for 32 consecutive days!

This challenge started out easy for me. I was wrapping up one project while a long-term gig simmered in the background. About halfway through, things got significantly busier. This meant posts during the last half of the month were a lot more rushed.

Having something to write about every day is a challenge! I knew it would be going in, but there were many days where I wanted to wimp out. I’m really glad I stuck with it, but I also think I’ll be posting more sporadically for the next little bit.

I do want to continue post on this site more. I love the control it gives me, and I really like slowly improving my own corner of the web again. I’d like to make some things easier, though.

It’s been annoying to have to manually post to social channels. One great part of the month was following the Pomo account on Mastodon. It used Echofeed by Robb Knight to follow people’s feeds and automatically toot about them. It was great to read through people’s work this way, and I’m going to look into using Echofeed myself going forward.

I spent a chunk of the month wondering: would I post more if I was using a real CMS? I’m pretty sure the answer is “no”, but it would make dealing with images and multiple content types easier. Instead of switching over to a CMS (Craft CMS would be my choice, by the way), I think I’ll see about building out some better tooling. I think I’d rather do this myself because it would be fun, it’s something I could keep writing about, and it lets me be hyper-picky about the technical details.

This challenge was great for giving me a goal I wanted to stick to, but it was tricky to write longer pieces. Over the month, I had several ideas for things I wanted to build. Each was fairly small, but none of them fit into the time I had to write. I usually only had about an hour set aside to post something, and often about half of that time was deciding on a subject. On the other hand, it did feel great to dash off some quick posts to highlight things I liked. I’m hoping I can keep the small posts flowing while also keeping time carved out to work on side-projects.

Including this post, I ended up writing over 10,500 words in May. Here were the my top five posts by traffic:

Many thanks to Anne Sturdivant for putting this thing together. I’ll almost certainly be back for more next year, but I hope to keep the habit going in the meantime.