#atozchallenge Reflections…

The nice people who organised April’s A-Z challenge have asked that anyone who participated in the month long blogging marathon publish a feedback post, giving their reactions and opinions on the whole experience.

Today is the deadline for the posts, so I thought I’d do a quick summing up.

The task of posting every day for a month is something I had already done once this year, for Just Jot It January, so I wasn’t overly worried about the schedule.
It was only the format that I thought might be a problem; I mean, coming up with a blog post themed around each letter of the alphabet sounds easy enough to begin with, until you realise how few subjects begin with “U”, “Q”, “X” and “Z”, to name just four.

So I had to cheat occasionally; finding that photography was a good fallback option, when I was short of time or inspiration, but I think I managed to acquit myself fairly honourably overall.

The one thing I found more problematic though, was the part of the challenge which required everyone who took part to visit other blogs and comment on them.
Not that I object to reading other bloggers’ work, you understand, (I spend a lot of time following, reading and commenting on a increasingly large number of blogs and enjoy the whole interactive element of the blogosphere) but the list of blogs who were supposedly taking part in the challenge was somewhat hit and miss.

For a start, the number of Blogger powered blogs made it impossible for me to comment on any of them, due to some sort of incompatibility between their platform and WordPress, which was frustrating.
But the thing that annoyed me the most was the fact that many of the blogs on the list clearly had no intention of taking part in the first place (a few of the links took me to blogs that hadn’t had a post published for several months) and featured no #atozchallenge posts whatsoever.
I can only assume that they either changed their minds after registering, or had signed up purely as a way to attract traffic. The fact that some of these blogs were on Blogger made them a moot point, and I did find one or two interesting posts on the non-participating blogs, on which I commented anyway, since I was there.

I also ignored the suggestion that I stuck to visiting the five blogs either side of me on the list (I think it was something like that, I’m not big on reading instructions) and simply browsed the list each day and stuck an electronic pin in it to pick my daily selection of articles, which led to some very interesting juxtapositions of style and content.
So if you were a regular visitor to Diary of an Internet Nobody for the month and I only popped by to see you once or twice, it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy your posts, I just wanted to take in as many new blogs as I could.

As to whether I’ll do it all again next year; well, I think you probably know by now, I’m a sucker for challenges and collaborations, so it seems very likely.

All in all a very rewarding experience and one for which I’d like to express my gratitude to the organisers, who did a fabulous job of curating such a massive project.

Thanks for reading, see you next April for more alphabetized abstractions and blatant cheating.

#atozchallenge