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.