Blaugust 2026 Group Project: Lessons Learned
After a very productive month of writing, we come to the final Blaugust 2026 Group Project writing prompt. It is titled lessons learned and is usually a chance to reflect on the festival and whether or not it has been to one’s satisfaction. Have you achieved your goals? What have you gained from the experience? Those sorts of things. It also poses two further questions; “What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?” and “what’s the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?” for your consideration. I’ll address the questions shortly. Firstly let’s mull over this years event and assess how it’s gone.
After a very productive month of writing, we come to the final Blaugust 2026 Group Project writing prompt. It is titled lessons learned and is usually a chance to reflect on the festival and whether or not it has been to one’s satisfaction. Have you achieved your goals? What have you gained from the experience? Those sorts of things. It also poses two further questions; “What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?” and “what’s the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?” for your consideration. I’ll address the questions shortly. Firstly let’s mull over this years event and assess how it’s gone.
174 people signed up to this years Blaugust 2026: Festival of Blogging. I believe more have taken part without formally adding their details to the roster. That’s a respectable number. Furthermore, there was a broad spectrum of participants taking part with several bloggers from Japan and China. With most modern web browsers capable of translation, language is no longer a barrier to participation. Like last year, there have been a lot of bloggers from the tech community participating and they have been an invaluable source of advice and guidance when it comes to questions about self hosting, static pages and RSS feeds. There has also been a broad spectrum of subject across all blogs, ranging from wildlife, personal journals, music and of course gaming. It has in some respects been quite difficult at times to keep up with the volume of blog posts being published each day. But there’s always been something interesting.
Has this year’s Blaugust been a success and a positive experience? I can only answer for myself and mine has been possibly the best ever. I had plenty to write about and was able to plan ahead and write posts days before publication. The only things that still alludes me is the art of writing brief posts. But I’m still working on it. As for the other bloggers, judging by the healthy and cordial conversations on Discord, I suspect that most participants enjoyed the festival. There’s been a prodigious amount of posts posted. I’ve added everyone who’s blog has an RSS feed to my blog directory so I can keep track of everyone’s output in the month’s to come. Developing and expanding the directory has become a future project. It may even end up as a site of its own.
Moving on, let’s tackle those questions posed earlier. Let’s begin with “what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?”, which is more complex than it first appears. I’ve been the recipient of lots of advice over my 58 years. Ranging from guidance on important life decisions to do I want a third flaming Sambuca. I think the one piece of advice that has served me the best is something my father told me. “Marshal your thoughts”. IE Think before you speak. Take time to consider things before expressing an opinion or taking a course of action. Apply critical thought to that which is presented to you. Another piece of advice that is worth consideration is “procrastination is the thief of time” which is a fancy way of saying don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today.
As for advice that I’ve given others, I’m not sure if I shared any of note. I tend to avoid generalities such as “follow your passions” because does that include arson, spree killing and regicide? I suppose as a blogger any advice I give should be related to writing and words. So I’ll trot out my favourite aphorism. “Say what you mean and mean what you say”, which is sound advice and a rare quality these days. I would also add the following quote which is usually attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes, although there is no official record of him having said this. Still its a sound point and something we should all live by. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Finally, it just remains for me to say to all people who took part in Blaugust 2026: Festival of Blogging, well done, as my 5 year old grandson has a habit of saying. Mind you, he usually accompanies this statement with jazz hands which I think is a little excessive. He also likes a “ta-da” so have one of those as well to celebrate a successful end to this event. I’m sure Belghast, our late founder of Blaugust, would be pleased that this festival of blogging continues
The Great Blaugust RSS Feed Debate
Once again, I have stumbled across an interesting debate that has provided me with an opportunity to write a blog post. Over on the Blaugust Discord Server, I read a comment from AgingGamer regarding RSS feeds and their significance with regard to blogging. This in turn referred me to a post by fyr (don’t you love all these nom de plumes) who wrote at depth about the ongoing community debate about the use of RSS/Atom feeds. The article explored the importance of such feeds with regard to reaching readers and providing accessibility to the disabled. All of which provided me with a great deal of food for thought. Mainly because I use a mainstream website service provider for my online endeavours, so RSS is by default built. I’ve never really considered not having such a facility at my disposal. But the rise in the IndieWeb scene challenges this assumption.
Once again, I have stumbled across an interesting debate that has provided me with an opportunity to write a blog post. Over on the Blaugust Discord Server, I read a comment from AgingGamer regarding RSS feeds and their significance with regard to blogging. This in turn referred me to a post by fyr(don’t you love all these nom de plumes) who wrote at depth about the ongoing community debate about the use of RSS/Atom feeds. The article explored the importance of such feeds with regard to reaching readers and providing accessibility to the disabled. All of which provided me with a great deal of food for thought. Mainly because I use a mainstream website service provider for my online endeavours, so RSS is by default built. I’ve never really considered not having such a facility at my disposal. But the rise in the IndieWeb scene challenges this assumption.
Apparently some bloggers do not like RSS/Atom feeds. That is not to say they are not inherently anti-RSS. The objections seem to be over XML feeds being limited in what information and functionality that they can provide. From a technical perspective many prefer HTML-based h-feed/h-entry microformats as a more elegant alternative. RSS just duplicates information that already exists on the website. Feeds can break and accumulate a surprising amount of interoperability baggage. Another argument is that RSS is relatively poor at representing social interaction. Feeds are good for providing notifications of new posts but not much else, such as comments or likes. There is also no support for responding to a post via your own site. Hence this discussion seems to be more about RSS-reader culture rather than RSS itself.
However, from my perspective as an old school blogger, there are some cultural differences that also shape this ongoing discussion. As with last years discussion about blog comments, there seems to be a generational shift in the way we prefer to interact with websites and blogs. I appreciate that those who hail from the IndieWeb scene often come from an IT professional background, so a key motivation is technical efficiency. There is also another group of bloggers who I shall politely describe as wishing to conduct their online interactions with others, very much on their own terms. Both groups appear to advocate the ability to read other peoples content, interact with it and even repost it without directly going anywhere near the source content. A means to observe and partake in a sort of measured form of social exchange. Possibly where the other party may not always be aware of the interaction in question.
Ultimately, you run your blog how you wish and use RSS/Atom feeds to suit your needs. If you wish to utilise some other system that’s fine. I personally like the RSS feed for my blog and it is set up the way it is on purpose. It shows the blogpost title and the first paragraph. It exists to bring traffic to my site. If you simply read the entire post via a reader, then you will possibly miss the “related posts” links at the bottom of each article. Traffic begets further traffic, or that is at least the theory. It is a minor point but often the images I use to compliment a blog post have been specifically chosen to have relevance to the thrust of the article. I may also have added a humorous caption that has a bearing on the matter or exists to lighten the tone if that is required. One of the keys aspects of blogging that is important to me is building a readership. Hence I see not only my posts but the entirety of my blog as part of an overall quid pro quo. I’ve created something potentially of interest. Please visit the site to read it.
I can see the allure of a philosophy of traversing the internet on your own terms. However, there is just a hint of cakeism about this approach. It may come at the expense of the social and community dimension of blogging. Some bloggers may see a reduction in blog traffic and direct interaction and think “Sod it. What’s the point”. AI summaries are already having a similar impact. Overall, I don’t think there is a definite answer to this debate. It’s a question of perspective and what you individually want from your online experience. Do you want to be able to access everything from a single point of presence and minimise all possible inconvenience. Is there a need to consider anything beyond that, such as the what the content creators may want in return for their output and the work they’ve put into it? The phrase “horses for courses” comes to mind as well as “things change”. Certainly this is an area of blog culture evolution to keep an eye on.
There is a subtle difference between being rash and being proactive. Being rash means acting too fast without thinking about the results, while being proactive is a question of acting early with careful planning. Why have I mentioned this? Well prima facie information indicates that recent Blaugust participants are interested in an “official” online presence for the annual festival of blogging, other than that existing Discord server. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. Not everyone likes using Discord and I do worry that they may reduce its free functionality at some point in the future. With regard to there being a Blaugust platform of some kind, there is a consensus that it doesn’t need to be some sort of sprawling commercially hosted website running on Wix or such like. Those sorts of site require funding, a degree of admin and possibly private data management. It also a bit too “corporate” if you like. Hence the logical compromise is to have a static site. Let it suffice to say, that has been done.