I thoroughly enjoyed the A-Z Challenge.\u00a0 From my perspective.\u00a0 Clearly, from the perspective of other participants, I was sometimes a pain. Why?<\/p>\n
– My Blogger login goes to a long-dormant blog, so anyone who participated in the challenge from a Blogger blog got that link if I commented back (until I realized the problem was even worse than that several days into the challenge).<\/p>\n
– The top post in my defunct Blogger blog does link to my primary blog.\u00a0 An extra step that busy challenge participants wouldn’t appreciate, I’m sure.\u00a0 But it’s worse still.<\/p>\n
– The blog I was blogging from for the challenge wasn’t either of those blogs.\u00a0 In fact, I was blogging from a blog that has search engines blocked, and it would have been very difficult to track down if you were coming from any comment link, because I use my primary blog to link in WordPress information blocks.<\/p>\n
– About two days after people were complaining about poor linkage to blogs in general (nobody specifically complained about me — they couldn’t find me, and I was okay with that), I realized this could be a problem if I was commenting on blogs I liked, so I began adding the URL in my comment (which can also be problematic, depending upon blog settings).<\/p>\n
Putting that behind me, visiting blogs was a pain until I discovered the randomizer button on the A-Z site.\u00a0 I’m not sure I could find it again, now, but once I found that, I clicked through a lot of sites and found several I enjoyed.\u00a0 I understand there was code to install it on a sidebar, but I didn’t try it.\u00a0 I understand some people had trouble getting the code to work.\u00a0 Since I didn’t try it, I can’t say.\u00a0 If there were problems, that would be something to get fixed, because those buttons were great.<\/p>\n
I’ve been blogging a long time, but I didn’t get the whole “follow” blogs instruction.\u00a0 As far as I know, that only works on Blogger.\u00a0 Maybe the term was generic for link to, or add RSS to, or something else (Pin on Pinterest, maybe?). Maybe on WordPress.com there is a follow button as well.\u00a0 I’m not sure, but it’s not a big thing on WordPress.org sites.\u00a0 I’m sure there’s a plug in, but I wasn’t that interested in it.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, therein, for me, lies the problem.\u00a0 I love the challenge of doing the A-Z posts.\u00a0 I don’t care for the rules (which can’t really be enforced anyway, but there was a lot of griping going on).\u00a0 If you’re a challenge organizer and you’re required to visit every blog entered, I can see the hassle.\u00a0 If you’re a participant and someone isn’t making it easy for you to check them out or follow, skip them.\u00a0 You both may be missing out on something amazing, but there were nearly 2000 participants.\u00a0 Everyone isn’t going to do it exactly the way you want or the instructions say.\u00a0 One friend of mine thought she had to drop out because near the end she got a day behind.\u00a0 That was ludicrous.\u00a0 Fortunately, several of us encouraged her to stay with it, and she decided to finish the last couple days of the challenge.\u00a0 She’d been making some tremendous posts.\u00a0 I would have hated to have missed a few because she thought she was too far behind.<\/p>\n
For me?\u00a0 Next year, I may do the challenge from my primary blog, which will make linking easier. Or, maybe I’ll do something different.\u00a0 I guess now that I’ve been retired for four years, I chafe more than I used to at arbitrary (but admittedly useful) rules.\u00a0 It is, after all, my blog.\u00a0 On the other hand, it’s their challenge.\u00a0 If I’m not willing to play by their rules, perhaps I shouldn’t say I’m playing.<\/p>\n
I am looking for structure to keep me posting to my blogs regularly.\u00a0 I could come up with something on my own, but I haven’t found what resonates with me yet.\u00a0 I’m trying various challenges to see if something strikes me as worthwhile, but I’m not working particularly hard at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thoroughly enjoyed the A-Z Challenge.\u00a0 From my perspective.\u00a0 Clearly, from the perspective of other participants, I was sometimes a pain. Why? – My Blogger login goes to a long-dormant blog, so anyone who participated in the challenge from a Blogger blog got that link if I commented back (until …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-z-challenge"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}