After a first attempt at mobile blogging, I found a process that works better for my work flow.
Throughout the day, I have ideas and need to write them down. This could be a coding process, a thought to remember, the start of a blog post, and more. I love a good notes app. I’ve
gone through quite a few and use a few for different things. Lately it’s been Simplenote.
…
As I took part in Bloganuary and began what’ll hopefully become a fifth
consecutive year of 100 Days To Offload, I started to hate my approach to mobile blogging and seek something better, too. My blog’s on WordPress, but it’s so highly-customised that
I can’t meaningfully use any of the standard apps, and I find the mobile interface too slow and clunky to use over anything less than a great Internet connection… which – living out in
the sticks – I don’t routinely have when I’m out and about. So my blogging almost-exclusively takes place at my desktop or laptop.
But your experience of using a notetaking app is reasonably inspiring. I’m almost never away from a “real” computer for more than a day, so there’s no reason I can’t simply write into
such an app, let it sync, and copy-paste into a blog post (and make any tweaks) when I’m sitting at a proper keyboard! I’m using Obsidian for
notetaking, and it Syncthing‘s to my other computers, so I should absolutely be leveraging that. I already have an Obsidian folder full of
“blog post ideas”… why shouldn’t I just write blog posts there.
I guess I’ve always been more of a sprinter/hurdles blogger than a marathon runner.
Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it’s easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I’m not
going to start thinking about the maths of that).
That’s not only much more-achievable… I’ve probably already achieved it! Let’s knock out some SQL to check how many posts I
made each year:
SELECTYEAR(wp_posts.post_date_gmt) yyyy,
COUNT(wp_posts.ID) total
FROM
wp_posts
WHERE
wp_posts.post_status='publish'AND wp_posts.post_type='post'GROUPBY yyyy
ORDERBY yyyy
My code’s actually a little more-complicated than this, because of some plot, but this covers the essentials.
A big question in some years is what counts as a post. Kev’s definition is quite liberal and includes basically-everything, but I wonder if mine shouldn’t perhaps be stricter.
For example:
Should I count checkins, even though they’re not always born as blog posts but often start as logs on geocaching websites?
(My gut says yes!)
Do reposts and bookmarks contribute, a significant minority of which are presented without any further
interpretation by me? (My gut says no!)
Does a vlog version of a blog post count separately, or is it a continuation of the same content? (My gut says the volume is too
low to matter!)
Can a retroactive achievement (i.e. from before the challenge was announced) count? Kev writes “there is no specific start date”, but it seems a little counter to
the idea of it specifically being a challenge to claim it when you weren’t attempting the challenge at the time.
Some posts are lost from 1998/1999. If they were recovered I might have made 100 posts in 1999, but probably not in 1998 as I only started blogging on 27 September 1998.
A heartfelt post about saying goodbye to Aberystwyth as I moved to Oxford on 16 June was my 100th of the year. Pedants might argue that
this year shouldn't count, but so long as you're willing to count checkins (and you should) then it would... and my qualifying post would have come only a couple of days
later, with a post about the Headington Shark, which I had just moved-in near to.
I'm not convined this low-blogging year should count: a clear majority of the posts were geocaching logs, and they weren't always even that verbose (consider this candidate for 100th post of 2013, from 1 October).
Another geocache log heavy, conventional blogpost light year that I'm not convinced should count, evem if the obvious candidate for 100th post would be 18 May's cool article about
geocaching like Batman!
I maintain that checkins should count, even when they're PESOS'd from geocaching sites, so long as they don't make up a majority of the qualifying posts in a year. In
which case this year should qualify, with the 100th post being my visit to this well-hidden London pub
while on my way to a conference.
My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection
between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport.
Total count of all the posts.
Doesn't add up? Not all posts feature in one of the years above!
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
In any case, I’d argue that I clearly achieved the revised version of the challenge on certainly six, probably fourteen, arguably (depending on how you count posts) as
many as nineteen different years since I started blogging in 1998. My least-controversial claims would be:
Given all these unanswered questions, I’m not going to just go ahead and raise a PR against the Hall of Fame! Instead, I’ll leave it to
Kev to decide whether I’m (a) eligible to claim a 14-time award, (b) merely eligible for a 4-time award for the years following the challenge starting, or (c) ineligible to claim
success until I intentionally post 100 times in a year (in, at current rates, another two months…). Over to you, Kev…
Update: Kev’s agreed that I can claim the most-recent four of them, so I raised a PR.
