Monday, February 6, 2017

Big Changes to Blogging A to Z

As you may recall, I participated in the Blogging A to Z challenge last April. Check out those posts here, and in particular this post showing the positive impact of the challenge on my blogging patterns.

Believe it or not, it's almost time to start thinking about the challenge for this year! The Blogging from A to Z Challenge blog just released some big news:
Those of us on the A to Z Team have been talking about preparations for this year's challenge, and one of the things we've discussed is The List. The truth is, The List is a lot of work, and we have fewer people to check the list and maintain it so that the only people who are on it are the ones actively participating. Our focus changes from the people who are actively participating to those who aren't, and that isn't fair.

We came up with a great solution to this:
  • Each day of the Challenge, we'll add a post with the letter of the day to the A to Z Challenge blog. When you've posted your entry to your blog, post a comment to the Challenge blog with a link to that day's post on your blog.
  • We'll also add a status update to our Facebook page each day with that day's letter. You may also post a link to your daily post as a comment to the latter post, either in addition to or instead of posting the link to the Challenge blog. 
  • And, we encourage you to post a tweet to Twitter with a link to your blog post. Be sure you add the hashtag #atozchallenge to your tweet, so we can find you.
So now, instead of adding my name to the list once, I'll be asked to comment on daily posts with the link to that day's A-Z post. A little more work, but not really, since I tend to share my posts on social media anyway. It's just one more copy-paste. Also, each blogger is given a schedule as a guideline but they can honestly schedule their posts however they want, just as long as they get 26 posts up during the month of April, one for each letter. This way, when I go read other blogs, I don't have to scroll through blogs that are following a different schedule and perhaps didn't post that particular day (or that signed up but changed their mind about participating for whatever reason).

Next on the A to Z schedule is the Theme Reveal Day, March 20th! I'm still trying to decide what to post about this year. Stay tuned!

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