Whew.  Made it through the 2014 April Blogging A-Z Challenge.  To everyone who visited, thank you! Now is a good time to reflect upon the challenge.  (Because today is the “official” day to do so for the challenge.)  2018 people signed up for the challenge.  I didn’t get anywhere close to visiting them all, but I started visiting people after me on the list, and I found a number of fascinating bloggers.  I tried to add the ones I was most fascinated by to my RSS reader list, but I’m certain I missed a few.  I may continue visiting after the challenge is done.  But I’m supposed to reflect on my experience, what I enjoyed, what I could have done better, and where the challenge folks could improve.

Let me start with the challenge folks.  I am amazed at how well they pull it off.  I’m not sure how many behind the scenes folks there are, but I think are are eleven team members who put their names on the challenge.  They do their best to get people to turn off word verification and other things.  They encourage people to make their blogs easy to navigate. Yet I found many, many blogs I could not find a way to leave a comment on.  Maybe there was a way, but I couldn’t find it buried in the clutter on their pages. I must not have been the only person to notice this, because one person specifically commented how easy my blog was to navigate (and sometimes I think mine can be a little cluttered). That’s not the team’s fault.  They spent the month or so leading up to the challenge encouraging people to get ready with educational posts designed to make everything run smoothly.

Then there were the people who signed up and never participated. That happens.  Sometimes a life event comes up, and I really appreciated the people who took the time to leave a post explaining when life intervened, and they wouldn’t be able to participate. For some of the others, I wondered if signing up for the challenge was something they considered as free advertising, and they made no effort to participate.  But the challenge folks?  They were great.  Not sure what to suggest other than keep doing the pre-challenge education.

As for my experience, this year, I had all my posts finished and scheduled shortly after the first week of the challenge.  That’s been my goal in the past, and this year, I finally achieved it for all practical purposes. I knew I’d be getting more traffic than usual, so I wanted to offer a variety of reading samples for my new and old visitors.  I encouraged people to leave comments about what they thought of the writing, and I did get some with helpful critiques as well as some laudatory comments.

I offered the opportunity to sign up to receive blog posts via email to save people from having to try to remember which blog they wanted to revisit.  A few people took me up on the offer early in the month, then sign ups dwindled.  I think think it was a useful service.  I put a sign up form at the end of each post to make it easier.  I have a sign up form in the sidebar at all times, and I don’t normally put one in each post (for some reason, the code tended to not save with the post, making that a less desirable option for me.)

Last year, I was blogging on two blogs, and I hadn’t gotten many of my posts scheduled in advance.  That meant I got to visit very few other blogs, and I decided then I wouldn’t participate this year.  Then, I realized I wanted an opportunity to showcase samples of my writing (mostly snippets and early drafts, so there’s room for improvement) to find out what seemed to speak to people.  If something in particular struck a chord with readers, I could move work on that project higher in the queue.   I also made a concerted effort to visit other blogs and comment on the ones I found interesting.

Views of my blog tripled from normal for the first three weeks of the challenge. The final week reflected a more normal viewing schedule.  I think by that time, everyone participating was exhausted and slowed down visiting.

It’s a fun challenge, and I look forward to participating next year.