Good Morning Everyone! It is almost time for Blaugust and in fact at the time of writing it… it is probably already Blaugust for our Oceanic participants. Timezones are weird. Anyways as is often the case before the official start of Blaugust I release various bits of information about the event. Namely this morning I updated the Media Kit page to include the Participant List Google Sheet and then created and uploaded an OPML file for those who use feed readers. This morning I had the fun time of trying to find RSS feeds for everyone. Side note, if yours is not prominently displayed you might want to change that because for as belabored as RSS is… it is still the best methodology for reading lots of blogs in a single application. I should also say that this participant list is not updated in realtime. There are various bits of data that I don’t share publicly from the sign-up sheet so generally speaking I update the sheet that I just shared once a day and dump a new OPML file at that same time.
At the time of writing this, we have 74 blogs signed up and ready to participate in Blaugust 2024. What is even more impressive however is of those 74, 34 are folks who have never participated in Blaugust before. I honestly thought that abandoning Twitter would be the death knell for this event, but in truth, it has caused it to find an entirely new life. Last year we had 103 participants which was by far our highest of the last decade. As always I assume the event is just going to be participants drawn from our list of usual suspects, but we keep reaching new audiences and I think a huge part of that has been planting our flag for the official account on Mastodon, specifically Gamepad.club the server I help manage. Blogging is very much alive and well in the Fediverse, and the community of folks that assemble there tend to be way more geeky and way more apt to spin up their own DIY services to fit their needs. As a result, it has been a perfect match for the spirit of Blaugust and I am extremely happy to see new faces rolling into our community discord.
Here is the list of blogs participating this year as of the time of writing this:
As I said above I am keeping an OPML file updated which should make it easy for you to import the entire batch into your feed reader of choice. I will also be updating my blogroll to include all of these folks.
In other news, I provided a version of this year’s logo without the checkerboard backing on it. This might fit your particular blog style or needs a bit better. I uploaded it yesterday on the discord, but also added it to the media kit page this morning. In this year’s information post, I threw out the idea of the “First Post of Blaugust” being one that introduces yourself to the community. I often have the false belief that everyone already knows me and that no one wants to know more information about me… since I pour so much of myself into the blog. However, in the spirit of the event, I plan on participating in the introductory post tomorrow and hope you will join me in this new tradition. Even though I have written countless introduction paragraphs over the years as I have joined many different communities on the internet, each time they end up being a little different. The benefit of writing it on my blog is that I can actually backlink further details if I have written a post about a specific topic in the past.
I hope this coming month is an amazing time for everyone participating in Blaugust 2024. I rarely go for the highest award and tend to just post on weekdays, save for Sunday when I post our podcast. I hope you take all of this assembled apparatus and make an event out of it that best suits your needs. While the core of the contest has always been “do 31 posts”, over the years it has become way less about that and more about mingling with your peers. Get out there, read a ton of posts, and get active in some conversations. As always I will be here lurking in the background if anyone needs anything. I am far from the most charismatic leader, and often get overwhelmed by large-scale social situations… but I appreciate each and every one of you that are joining in this nonsense.
Happy Blaugust Eve!
The post Blaugust 2024 Eve appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
