Weekly Blog Post Challenge

Getting Started - Weekly Blogging

The Challenge

You probably should know that I almost didn’t write this post. Besides, who really wants to spend a few hours of their precious time every week writing a blog post? I mean, really, don’t you have better things to do with your time than write a blog post? I certainly do, but here we are anyway. Because reasons. I’ll get into those later.

As you’ve probably guessed from the title, I’m starting a weekly blog post challenge. The goal of this challenge is to develop a habit. A long lasting habit. One that will stick with me for more than just a few weeks and go to the wayside. Some of the side effects of this habit will produce a bunch of content for my blog and hopefully progress my writing ability.

The challenge will start July 1st, 2016, and end June 30th, 2017. I plan to write a wrap up post on July 7th, 2017 about my experience blogging every week.

Now I don’t expect to be perfect at this, but that is what I’m striving for.

Here’s how I’m going to do it all.

The Setup

To accomplish this habit I’ve decied to setup a few gentle reminders throughout the week to keep me on track. The first of these is a weekly recurring calendar event that will remind me when I need to have the content posted. This should hopefully keep that ever looming deadline in the back of mind. And as we all know, deadlines tend to rule our lives.

The second of these reminders is a daily reminder on my todo list to work on my blog. Now, my todo list system has only been in place for a few months now, but it has proven to be a great motivator for me. I’ve developed numerous other habit with it, so hopefully it will push me to work on my blog just as much as it has pushed me to brush my teeth!(Sad, I know.)

The last reminder I have in place is a trusted friend. He will bug me the day before my blog post is due to proofread what I have written so far.

This, I hope, will be a sturdy enough system to keep me blogging every week.

The Topics

While the topics will vary a bit, the main focus will be around technology. I mainly work on software development in my spare time so that is what I plan to focus on, but I suspect there will be a few posts that tend to spill over from my day job doing sys admin stuffs.

A few things to look forward to are my experience with Hugo and transferring everything from Blogger, my journey through learning GoLang, and many many more topics on various languages and frameworks. I might throw a book review or two in there from the must read lists. We’ll see.

The How

For those curious how I’ll be writing my posts, I’ll be doing as I have always done and sticking to VIM and Markdown. I’ll then convert the posts over to beautiful and luscious html with Hugo and push to a public GitHub Pages repository that will host thing whole shindig. I may move this over to a VPS at some point, but at the moment I see no need to.

The Why

Why? Why do you persists Mr. Ander… wait, no. Why I’m doing this is fairly simple and fairly complicated all at the same time. Mainly as stated above I want to generate a habit that is blogging. Something I’ve wanted to do for some time, but I never really felt the need to dedicate any amount of time to it.

The other reason, though, and probably the better motivator for me personally, is to push me to do interesting things that are worthy of a blog post or three. These might include a wall mounted monitor powered by a Raspberry Pi, or exploring Containers and where I can use them in my journeys as a software developer. The world may never know what ends up here, hopefully a few of you stumble upon this mess and find something interesting.

The When

As mentioned, I’ll be starting my first official post into this on July 1st, 2016 and ending on June 30th, 2017. I will hopefully by then have developed this bloggin habit to the point where it will keep going. Maybe not at the same pace, but hey, maybe!

The plan is to post every 7 days, so, on Friday nights. I may end up scheduling the posts to go live on Saturday morning, but for now Friday nights it is. There’s an RSS link on here as well if you’re looking to subscribe, might want to check that out.

The End

Well I guess that’s it for now. You’ll see a post from me, assuming all goes well, in 6 days.

See you all then, and happy scrolling!