On blogging, Blaugust and challenging yourself

on blogging

Why do we blog? There are a ton of reasons and everyone who blogs have their own motivations and reasons. You could ask every blogger you follow and probably get as many answers as you ask people.

I write this blog because I have ideas rummaging in my head and I need to write them down to process them. Like Fran eloquently puts it:

Putting your words on paper, even if digitally, forces you to deal with the core of the topic at hand.

Writing ideas down in tangible form helps you discover gaps and structure those ideas in a way that helps me think them further and to have discussions about them with other people.

None of that requires me to publish those writings though, so it only covers half of the picture. My motivation for publishing is that if I already worked through my ideas and wrote them down in a (hopefully coherent) form, why not publish. I enjoy sharing my ideas so they can be read, challenged and discussed by other people. That’s who I learn more.

Sometimes I write and share to spread joy. Just this Monday, I wrote about a scene from a movie that I enjoyed. Maybe someone else will enjoy that, watch the movie and find joy in it. Yay.

A lot of my technical blogging has to do with documenting what I’ve tried and learned. I write them down to my notes so I can discover them later when I inevitably run into the same or similar issue again. I share them because I’ve gotten a lot of help and ideas from other blogs in the internet and want to contribute to that pool of resources.

At times of my career, I’ve also written about a lot of technical stuff to build a body of work to increase my chances of finding interesting work.

on Blaugust

Every August — for over a decade already —, a group of bloggers gather together in the blogosphere to celebrate blogging, to learn from each other, to encourage each other and to challenge themselves. That community and the month-long festival of blogging is called Blaugust and I’ve been participating since 2023.

For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. Above all the goal of Blaugust has always been to prove to folks that they can in fact sit down every day and create something fresh and then share it with the world. / Belghast, https://aggronaut.com/2024/07/12/blaugust-2024-is-coming/

Last year, over 150 people participated in the challenge. (And some people say blogging is dead.)

One of the original goals of Blaugust was to publish 31 blog posts in 31 days of August. Over the years, different alternative goals have been added to make it more serving for all sorts of bloggers. 31 in 31 is kinda hardcore but the positive effects appear on much lower amount of posts as well and the main goal is to encourage people to write.

If you want to be one of those people this year,

• Check out the info post by Nerd Girl Krikket
• sign up
• optionally join our lovely Discord community where you can share your ideas, your posts, ask for help or inspiration and get mental support for writing.

The other challenges or goals are

• Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
• Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2026.
• Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2026.
• Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2026.
• Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2026.

on challenging yourself

Let’s be clear: you don’t need to participate in any kind of online writing challenge or event to enjoy blogging or to write daily/weekly/monthly or to write thoughtful replies to other people’s posts.

I find these events wonderful for the community that gathers around them. I’ve met so many wonderful people from around the world through things like Blaugust, IndieWeb Carnival, Junited or NaNoWriMo.

The social accountability in these events helps me a lot. Publishing daily on the blog is tough. I’m proud I’ve managed to succeed in that already three Blaugusts in the running, I can’t imagine right now doing that for a longer period than one month a year. (Well, kinda twice because I do Advent of Code in December)

There are no real stakes: if I don’t manage to get my 31 posts done, nothing happens. I’m not beholden to any contract or even a promise to finish and succeed in my goal. Even then, making that commitment to join and aim for a goal gives me a lot of will power to achieve it. I find that kind of stubbornness one of my biggest strengths in getting stuff done in general.

Here’s my hot take on all of these, based on discussions I often have with people when I share the month’s Carnival theme or Blaugust or something else: you don’t have to follow any rules. Of course, that might mean that you’re not eligible to be part of the challenge or the event but none of these events are the point in themselves. Writing is.

If an event like this gives you ideas and encouragement to write more, go ahead. We are all publishing in our own blogs and we are the ultimate arbiters of what goes into our blogs. Don’t let the “can I do X?” questions in your head limit you from exploring ideas and topics in your blog just because they might not exactly match the rules of someone else’s challenge.

For example, with IndieWeb Carnival, I always use the theme selected by the host and their introduction to it as a starting point but I give myself pretty much unlimited creative freedom on how much I follow it. If at the time of publishing that blog post, I feel I can justify its participation in that theme, I send it to the host. Sometimes I feel I’ve travelled too far from the original path for it to make sense but the Carnival has done its positive thing already. I then leave it up to the host to decide if they consider it an acceptable entry.

Whether you have a blog already or not, I recommend joining Blaugust this year. In the community, we often repeat the mantra of “the only way to lose is not to participate”. Every post you make is a win, even if you only publish one in August.