Well, it’s finally here, the end of November and vDM30in30 (Writing a blog post every day in November). It was a great experience and I’m glad I participated. It was also great to see other that took the challenge and did their best to write a post a day.
It was especially nice to see many newcomers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was not a race or competition but rather an exercise writing.
Big takeaway is to just write
The biggest lesson I learned about blogging is to “just write”. It’s the only way you will improve. It’s also a way to clarify and structure your thoughts. I intend to continue my blogging, not at the pace of 30in30 but at least once a week.
I would like to have some long form material, where I can go into some depth on a technical topic. I noticed during the 30in30, my sweet spot was between 300-600 words. I think that works for this challenge, but I’d like to write longer.
Grammar tools that can help
To help improve my writing I also used a couple of grammar writing tools, they were Grammarly and Hemingway Editor. For most of my posts I used Grammarly and liked it, I recently started with Hemingway and it seems useful. I hope it shows in the content I’ve written.
I also enjoyed reading posts that were not tech related. That gave the me a chance to get to know the blogger beyond their regular work. Always insightful when looking behind the curtain.
This was a challenge, full day of work then coming up with ideas to write about in the evening. One thing I tried not to do was buffer a bunch of posts, I wrote everyday and enjoyed it.
Next year I want to have a series of posts that build towards something. Instead of posts that seemed like they were all over the place. But that can wait for next November.
Where did you get those cool photos?
BTW – for those folks interested in where I get my photos that are used on my blog, you can find them here – The Stocks, the best royalty free stock photos in one place. Looks for the startup stock, that’s were I pull most of my photos.
I also used an online compressor to reduce the size of the photo, so it would load faster.
I want to thank everyone that took the time to read my posts, let me know what you thought of them on Twitter. Stay tuned for upcoming posts and happy reading.