I’ve not blogged too much recently, so what better way to get back on the horse than with a bit of Blaugust?

If you don’t know, Blaugust Festival Of Blogging is a yearly month-long blogging community event. The only real purpose is to get people posting more in August. Originally, it was every day, but now you can choose your participation level; I usually aim for Silver, which is 15 posts, i.e. every other day. Alongside that, there’s a Discord chat I’m rubbish at participating in (as I am with every Discord chat), and usually some other fun little community activities. Each year, an OPML file containing each participant’s RSS link is provided, so you can import that into your feed reader and follow along with everyone’s posts.

This is probably ill-advised given how many other little projects I have over August, but even if it inspires me to make a few extra posts, that’s better than nothing, right?

This year, Blaugust follows the very sad passing of its founder, Belghast. I won’t pretend I knew Belghast, or even read his blog that often (since it was mainly about MMOs, which I don’t play). But it is my understanding he was a pillar of his gaming community who has also done a lot for blogging (Blaugust has been going since 2014!), and is sorely missed. I am grateful to the Blaugust mentor community for continuing this legacy by organising this year’s event.

If you’d like to join in the fun, then you will need a blog. Any platform will do. Hell, use Mastodon if you like. But if you want an easy option with a free tier, my current recommendation would be Bear Blog for its simple minimalism and built-in community features. There’s also free Wordpress. For very cheap you can also get a more full-featured platform at Micro.blog or Pika.

Then, read the info and sign-up!

As a final note, last year there was some spirited discussion about how Blaugust used to encouraging commenting on other blogs, but now that static blogs are so popular, this aspect has been lost. I made a post in which I talked myself into agreeing that comments might be a fun thing to have and guess what: I now have a comments server. It’ll go live on the front-end at the start of Blaugust as something of an experiment :)