99 Days of Blogging
2024-12-01
With this post, for the first time ever - and given that I've been blogging for over 26 years, that I'm still finding noteworthy blogging "firsts" is pretty cool, I think - I've blogged for 99 consecutive days! My previous record "streak" was only 37 days, so there's quite a leap there.
I didn't set out with the aim of getting to a hundred, as I might well manage tomorrow, but after a while I began to think it a real possibility. In particular, when a few different factors came together:
- Kicking off my first sabbatical gave me lots of free time, and although I've mostly filled it with voluntary work and travel, there's been a greater-than-usual amount of blogging (often about those two things!) too.
- Posting a daily photo of my bleppy dog for the month of September Bleptember provided an early boost.
- Travel's given me more opportunity for geocaching (and, this last week, geohashing), as reflected in my copious checkin logs for that period.
- Earlier this year, inspired by Clayton Errington, I came up with a process to streamline my mobile blogging "flow" (My site's backed by WordPress, but the mobile wp-admin isn't the best and my site's so-customised that apps like Jetpack mangle my metadata.). I now use a custom Progressive Web App to provide a better interface for quickly posting on-the-move to one or both of this blog and my personal Mastodon account, which I tested heavily during Bleptember.
Previous long streaks have sometimes been aided by pre-writing posts in bulk and then scheduling them to come out one-a-day. I mostly don't do that any more: when a post is "ready", it gets published.
I didn't want to make a "this is my 100th day of consecutive blogging" on the 100th day. That attaches too much weight to the nice round number. But I wanted to post to acknowledge that I'm going to make it to 100 days of consecutive blogging... so long as I can think of something worth saying tomorrow. I guess we'll all have to wait and see.