A to Z Reflection 2017

So, this is my second year participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, and the mods have again asked for reflection posts from participants.

1. I’m going to start by seeing how well I used what I learned last year. In that reflection post, I said that I would (a) use a theme, (b) write my posts in advance, and (c) identify blogs w/shared interests early so I could follow them before the challenge starts.

(a) I did, indeed, use a theme (mine was gratitude). In fact, I really cannot imagine doing this challenge without one. I need the structure.

(b) I did not write my posts in advance. I will probably never write my posts in advance. To be fair, my theme didn’t allow for it since I wrote about something I was grateful for each day. But to also be realistic, I almost never do anything in advance, so.

(c) I did, in fact, identify blogs early on to follow. This was smart. I did find some new blogs throughout the course of the challenge as well, but it was nice to have a starting point.

2. So here’s where I give feedback on the new structure. Part of what helped me identify blogs early was the lack of a linky since most (but not all) people posted what they were doing in a comment. I was able to decide based on how they posted whether or not to check out their reveal post and/or whether to read subsequent posts. I LOVED NOT HAVING THE LINKY. I don’t think it lends well to this challenge.

Last year, I spent a lot of time clicking on links to blogs that I wasn’t interested in at all, and this time I rarely had that experience. I was able to see what people were posting about and decide whether or not to check their blogs out based on that. It was awesome.

3. I really appreciated the mirror blog that was set up on WordPress. As usual, I had issues posting to Blogger, so the WordPress option worked well for me. I probably would have done even better posting to the Facebook prompt, but I kept forgetting about it.

4. I wound up not keeping up with posting links to my blog but that was because April is the end of the semester, and I was slammed with work. I was usually writing my posts right before heading to bed so was just happy to get it done and wasn’t worried so much about promotion.

5. Blogger users really need to turn on anonymous commenting. I will say this for every challenge I participate in. For some reason, Blogger absolutely hates me and won’t let me sign in with any of my OpenID stuff and boots me any time I try to make a comment. It’s a real barrier to commenting because I’ll just give up. Not to mention, halfway through, Blogger started eating my comments. It’s frustrating and annoying and led to me avoiding Blogger posts w/o anonymous commenting (and, yes, I would check that first).

6. I will probably not participate in any month-long challenges back-to-back again. It was just a bit too much for me.

7. Here are some of the blogs I enjoyed reading/visiting during the challenge:

• Lu posted about her favorite Disney characters, complete with original drawings
• The Widow Badass posted about preparing for a badass retirement
• True North Bricks posted about LEGOS!, complete with awesome photography
• Trudy posted about food in film
• Sara highlighted her beautiful (and delicious! I’m guessing based on the pictures and her descriptions, obviously) baked creations
• Calen hosted a Name That TV Show game (I only guessed two because they were all before my time)
• AJ posted bookish and book blogging memories
• GirlGriot experimented with writing chōkas

8. Here are the posts I wrote that got the most traffic:

• H is for Healing #AtoZChallenge
• G is for Gratitude #AtoZChallenge
• O is for Other TV Options #AtoZChallenge

9. And here are some of my favorite posts I wrote during the challenge:

• U is for Undergoing the Natural Hair Journey #AtoZChallenge
• P is for Positive Feedback #AtoZChallenge
• N is for New Bloggers, New Readers #AtoZChallenge
• J is for Jesus Be a Fence #AtoZChallenge
• G is for Gratitude #AtoZChallenge
• A is for Acceptance #AtoZChallenge

10. And that’s it! I did it again. I SURVIVED.