4 posts categorized "365 in 2011"

365 Blog Posts In The First 146 Days of 2011....

Yesterday I passed a milestone in writing for 2011... I posted my 365th blog post across my own network of blogs and Voxeo's blogs. Doing the math, that works out to an average of 2.5 blog posts per day for the first 146 days of 2011.

If you go back to the goal I set for myself in January, my aim was for 365 DAYS of blog posts. I missed that actual goal by dropping a day in March and in truth I also didn't post for an entire weekend in April.

Regardless, the average seems to be pretty good! :-)

And admittedly, it was kind of fun to look yesterday at the spreadsheet I've been keeping to track my blogging activity and realize that I was going to pass by the 365 mark.

And now... the writing continues... (this post is actually now my 367th...)


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365 Days of Blog Posts in 2011 - Missing The Goal On Day 64

2011calendar-1.jpgOuch... I was doing so well... I have been well on my way toward my goal of 365 days of blog posts in 2011. I published a blog post every single day of January and February, including the entire week I was on vacation.

And then I blew it and missed the goal instead on just a regular, mundane Saturday...

I did NOT publish a blog post on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

Not on any of my personal blogs... not on any of Voxeo's blogs... nowhere. :-(

Now, yesterday I did create my weekly audio report for the For Immediate Release podcast, but that doesn't count since it won't actually be online until Monday. I did post some photos to Facebook and post some status updates there. I did put out a few tweets, too.... but none of the longer-form content on my blogs that this goal was all about.

I could, of course, rewrite history a bit and publish a post today that was dated yesterday. None of you would know just from reading the blogs... but of course that wouldn't be honest and, besides, close examination of my Twitter stream would show that I didn't publish any posts (and... (gasp!)... I only tweeted twice yesterday). :-)

I can't claim it was any big distraction... it was just a regular Saturday. I was exhausted after a crazy week of travelling and was just enjoying my first full day back with my family. Doing some errands, taking a small road trip to see a local curling club, hanging around the house... just reveling in the normalcy of time at home. And completely spacing the fact that I didn't have a post queued up to go out.

And that's the key that has helped me achieve my goal thus far:

I have been scheduling my posts out several days in advance.

Acting on my own advice, I have been writing posts and queuing them up across my blogs. In effect I have had a blogging "buffer" that worked great for days like yesterday when I got busy and didn't think of writing (or thought about it, as I did several times, but didn't do it). For my vacation week, I had almost all the week queued up in advance for both my own blogs and the Voxeo blogs. I have had a queue of posts to go up online and then have added more posts that have been responding to breaking news or events. It's been working great.

So what happened?

Well, I unfortunately let the queue of written posts run dry. It certainly wasn't from lack of ideas... my brain continues to be constantly exploding with ideas. But I hadn't turned those ideas into actual written posts... which was exactly the discipline that this 2011 goal was all about.

So what now?

I will continue, of course. The goal will now be for 364 days of blog posts in 2011... and if I don't blow it again and continue the process into 2012 perhaps I will be back here on March 6, 2012, writing about how I wrote posts for an entire year!

I wondered if I could make it the whole 365 days... but didn't expect to miss it on day 64. Ah, well. (On the other hand, I had a truly wonderful day with my family yesterday, and at the end of the day that is what is most important! :-)


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365 Days of Blog Posts: How Did I Do in January 2011?

365posts jan2010Given that I publicly set myself a goal to write at least one blog post every day of 2011, it's only fair to check in on that goal and see how I'm doing.

How did I do in January 2011?

Well, the image on the right shows the picture. In the 31 days of January, I published:

87 total blog posts, of which:
54 were on my personal blogs - 1.7 / day
33 were on Voxeo blogs - basically 1/day

And for my personal blogs, I did publish at least one post on each and every day of January.

Now, my original goal was just to track what I published across my personal blogs... and that's still my overall aim. But I figured it couldn't hurt to also track the Voxeo blogs and see how I do there.

I should note, of course, that this Voxeo number is not all the posts across all the Voxeo blogs - it is all the posts that I wrote. There are other contributors, although my posts do make up about 2/3 of the content that we publish (but, gee, that's my job at Voxeo :-)).

So... yes, I hit my target for the month of January. Let's see if I can keep that going all the way through February, particularly given that I'm taking a week of vacation.

For those interested, I'm simply manually tracking the number of blogs in a Numbers spreadsheet on my iPad. I toyed with creating a script that would count up my Friendfeed feed or something like that... and maybe I'll build some kind of counter like that this year... but at the moment I'm just using a spreadsheet on my always available iPad.

Fun stuff... the challenge continues...


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2011 Target: 365 Days of Blog Posts

2011calendar-1.jpgAs part of my 3 Words for 2011, I've set myself an aggressive personal goal for my "CONTENT" focus...

I want to publish at least one blog post every day of 2011.

To define that a bit better, my target is to publish at least one post across my personal blogs:

(and any other personal blogs I launch in 2011). I'll also count any videos I upload to my personal YouTube account.

Additionally, I'll certainly publish posts at the Voice of VOIPSA blog and will be steadily churning out content over on Voxeo's blogs... but I'm leaving those sites out of my count.

Now the reality is that many days I'll probably publish more that one post across those four blogs... but there have been many days in the past when I haven't published any posts at all. And I generally have not been publishing any posts on most weekends.

To do this will take some discipline. I'll also be using the "scheduling" feature of my various blog platforms to schedule posts on weekends, vacations and when I'm traveling.

WHY am I setting this target? Partly just as a target to aim for. Partly to force myself to clean out the very large queue of blog post ideas I have. Partly to force myself to write and not get lost in all the distractions we have today. And partly as purely an interesting exercise to see IF I can do it.

Let's see how it goes... the good news is that you all will be very able to see whether I hit that target! :-)


Note: Calendar image from Timeanddate.com


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