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Welcome to Blogust

Why I'm trying to write every day this month.

I’ve not been as productive at populating this new site as I’d hoped. There’s plenty of legitimate reasons, but I’m just not making the progress I’d hoped and intended when I started the new site. I write for this site as a way of putting my thoughts into a more concrete form and potentially as a form of self-promotion. I don't write this blog for direct monetary gain, and it's usually pretty low on my daily priority list. Let’s face it, donalbrecht.com had all of 13 unique visitors last week. I’m not overheating any servers anywhere. I consider writing incredibly valuable over the long term; I just succumbed to the usual human failing of occasionally prioritizing short-term and pressing concerns over long-term, more indefinite returns.

Last week, I realized 2 things. First, I hadn’t done any reinvestment in this site since April. Second, One of the blogs I follow announced an attempt to deliver a post every day for August. If you’ve read this far, you realize I’m about to announce my intentions to do the same. Unfortunately, I need to be respectful of the reality of my life and the technical limitations of this site, therefore this is not a commitment to publish a new post every day. Instead, I intend to publish a total of 31 articles between the start of the month and midnight on Saturday the 31st.

Towards that end, here are the rules I’m setting for myself.

  • There must be a new post for every day on the month, even if they don’t appear daily.
  • The posts for a week must true up by the end of the day on each Sunday (5th, 12th, 19th, 26th & 2nd)
  • The average length of posts needs to exceed 500 words.

Naturally, given the rather large volume of production, I’m committing to, the content should skew much more towards the narrative and opinion and away from technical experimentation. I also expect the quality of the posts will fall a bit low; I’ll likely be rewriting them at some point in the future with more polish and perspective. Luckily, given my traffic, I’ll honestly just be building a long tail of content for the search engines and not risking my reputation too broadly.

Lastly, I need to point out that this has nothing to do with the previous UN Vaccination awareness campaigns (http://blogust.org/about-blogust-2016/). I wish I could claim some altruistic purpose for the exercise, but selfishly, It's only intended to keep me moving forward and making progress.