Blaugust 2025 epilogue!
While it's already been several days since the official end of Blaugust, I thought it would still be good to mark the occasion with some celebration and reflections as a first-timer to this month-long daily blogging festival!
I managed to make a post for all 31 days of August, keeping up the momentum for a complete blogging streak throughout the month. In accordance with this year's Blaugust challenge guidelines, this means I've achieved the Rainbow Diamond Award, for completion of the original core challenge of posting 31 times (or more) during the month. I mainly did "spotlight" posts to share a little bit about some kind of media that I enjoy, which remains the intent of this blog. Yay! I'm proud that I managed to fully finish the challenge. But more than that, I'm happy that it got me motivated to practice sharing my own thoughts and talking about things that I enjoy, thus sticking to what I set out to do with this blog. Joining Blaugust also prompted me to try using RSS feed readers for the first time, in order to try keeping up with blogs and updates from elsewhere that I enjoy. The discoverability of encountering new and interesting folks and posts, even just by randomly clicking through feed updates at times, was really fun and refreshing. I was often able to learn about cool new tools, resources, or other neat online tips and tricks from the many indie web-savvy bloggers out there. I learned a lot from doing Blaugust, and look forward to carrying it onwards with me into whatever else comes next!
I didn't end up participating in any of the larger Community Builder challenges, though I think that is probably fair as I was really just trying to gain my footing with doing Blaugust for the first time as a personal challenge. However, I'm glad those wider community-focused challenges exist for the bloggers who do take them on, as they feel very much in the spirit of the kind of internet spaces I'm always happy to see more of. Having never known about Blaugust before the past month, I did do my best to learn a bit more about it and its origins. From what I understand, it has roots in the MMO (massively multiplayer online) game blogging community, which I think is super cool. I don't have any familiarity in those communities myself, so catching the occasional posts from bloggers in those spheres was neat. And it was interesting to catch snippets of the discussion on what appears to be a long-running and passionate debate about comments on blogs, too. I had no idea it was so somewhat contentious! It hadn't occurred to me to take comments into consideration when starting my own blog or choosing a blogging platform, and I suppose I just ended up with a commentless-by-default "minimalist" blog because I went with Bear Blog. Personally, I chose Bear Blog because it happened to fit the right mix of simple, privacy-focused, and accessible platform that I was seeking. Though I definitely understand the desire, and even frustration, behind wanting more interactivity on blogs via comments, because opportunities for community-building are part of what can make it fun and valuable. However, I think it can also be just as fun and valuable for people to have spaces for their own personal self-expression, to just safely exist online (particularly if you are someone not generally given a lot of space to do that elsewhere in life), whether or not the focus of that online presence includes the option for it to be directly commented on by others. I think it raises interesting questions about what we feel like we collectively owe each other. How do important considerations around respecting necessary boundaries, meaningful avenues for needed connection, and nurturing openness for expansive dialogue intermingle with each other? How can we be wary of not slipping too far in other directions that may feed a sense of entitlement, self-righteousness, or reductiveness about what or who these things (blogs, but perhaps online spaces in general) can be for? I obviously have no answers myself, but it was overall nice to see these valuable conversations going on!
I'm definitely glad I tried, and successfully finished, Blaugust as a first-timer to the challenge! As for what comes next for me here on this blog, I have no particular plans, but I hope I can continue using it to explore my thoughts about things I appreciate, as a playground for sincerity. So for now, that's a wrap on my Blaugust experience, and on this blog post!