Blog Challenge, May 2021

Background

Those of you that are regular readers of the blog, may have noticed that more content was published this week than in weeks or even years past. There's a explanation for this.

Sometime ago, the fiancee and I discussed doing a YouTube video challenge. The objective was that we post a video on our respective channels each day for a month. Given that we had some time on both of our schedules, I brought the idea back up again. Through the discussion, the idea went from a month of videos to a month of blog posts. Then it went from a month of blog posts to a week of blog posts.

The Rules

The rules for the challenge were simple. The rules for the challenge were to post every day of the challenge. That's it. We were not interested in making it too complex as setting the bar too high, could mean that the challenge would not get done at all. Perhaps in the future, the rules may be a bit more rigid like a minimum number of works or writing posts related to a particular theme.

The Posts

Some of the content that I wrote, was for project documentation. Since I keep my software project documentation on my blog, I counted it as a blog post. Fiancee disagreed, but whatever.

If you did not see the posts that I made this week, here is a summary of them below.

Lessons Learned

While it has been a productive week, there were some lessons that I learned from doing this challenge.

  • Content creation requires some skill - To be able to come up with new ideas and topics all the time, requires a lot of creativity.
  • Spell check - Since I write my blog posts in a text editor (I am a programmer after all) and not in a word processor, sometimes I have misspelled words in my posts and have to go back and correct them. Those misspellings are from the result of fat-fingering when typing, not so much not knowing how to spell. Going to have to look into using an online grammar check service or adding a step to the CI/CD process of my blog that will check spelling of the content. For the time being, I am copying an pasting into MS Word or LibreOffice Writer and after doing the check, then pasting back into my IDE.
  • Grammar check - Like with spell check, grammar check on my posts would also be great if there was an online service that offered it or that I could integrate it with my CI/CD process of publishing new blog posts. Like with spell check, I copy and paste the post into a word processor and then back to the IDE once the check has been completed.
  • Post Scheduling - I do not currently have the ability to schedule posts since I use a static website for my blog. Instead, I write the posts ahead of time in a different branch. Then when I am ready to publish the post, I create and merge a pull request on my blog's repository and the CI/CD process takes care of generating the files and pushing them to the website. Since the CI/CD is doing the bulk of the work, I can initiate and complete the pull request from any device that allows me to access GitHub.

Conclusion

You will see more posts from me going forward. Technology and Handyman posts will be regular as they will be synchronized with my YouTube videos. You will start seeing more posts in the Gardening category, because I intend on using the blog as journal to track work in the garden going forward. Hope you enjoy the readings and there will probably be another challenge in the future that will hopefully go for a month.

Posted: 2021-05-08
Author: Kenny Robinson