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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.

Calendar showing Sunday 25 August through Sunday 1 December inclusive, with a coloured "spot" on each day with a size corresponding to the number of posts made on that day, broken into a pie chart showing the proportion of different post kinds. The dots are sized based on the number of posts and broken-down by post kind: articles are blue, notes are green, checkins are orange, reposts are purple, and replies are red.

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.

Links

@dan@danq.me - my personal Mastodon account, where many of my notes get crossposted

My longest streak stats

Bleptember

How I consider myself to be the primary audience for my blog

About my non-collection of webstats