It's December 31st, the last day of December, and also the last day of the Blogging for Benjamin contest. This is the final post I'll be making for this contest. I'm really pleased that I participated in this contest because I learned quite a few things, I've communicated a few things that I'd been meaning to share, and I've created a bunch of snippets and tutorials for WordPressers.
Blogging for Benjamin Stats
Blog Content
- 31 posts created (one each day)
- 9 WooCommerce posts
- 3 Ninja Forms posts
- 2 JetPack posts
- 9 Code Snippets / Plugins created
- 17 Comments
Traffic
Traffic for SpeakingInBytes.com
There was definitely an increase in traffic while I was blogging. The one exception was my post in November about Contributing to WordPress Core which was pretty popular (at least by my humble blog's standards).
What I Learned
I think the best part of this competition is that I learned things that I didn't expect to learn.
Writing Isn't Hard
It's the end of the month and I still have plenty of ideas in my head that I want to share. Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part it's finding the time to write them up. There's plenty of material to discuss in the WordPress world so if you want to blog daily you can! I love hearing different opinions and that's the best part about blogging is involving yourself in the discussions in the community and putting in your two cents.
I know my writing has improved. It used to take me hours and hours to write up a post and now it's closer to an hour to write a post. When I first started writing I often had to change the title of my post after I wrote a little bit and figured out what I wanted to say. Now I have a better grasp of what I'm trying to say and I write it down the first time without me having to rewrite large chunks of the post.
There's definitely a lot of aspects of my writing that can be improved.
- Use more descriptive words. So instead of using words like “things” use a more applicable word like “aspects”, “settings”, “techniques”, “considerations”, etc.
- Break down complex ideas into smaller parts. It's really easy to just keep writing and writing and to throw a whole bunch of ideas together into one blog post. I'm really trying to break down these complex ideas into multiple smaller blog posts. That way I can reference those posts later in a more complex topic.
Competition is Good
Something that you don't often hear is that competition is good. I'm not just talking about pricing here. The competitive nature of this contest made me blog every. single. day. If I wasn't competing against other people I wouldn't have blogged nearly as much.
Learning About my CoWorkers
It was great to read all of the posts by my coworkers. I learned so much about them and we had a little bit of an echo chamber effect going on. Coen would post something which would inspire me to post something which he would then comment on in a future post. It was great to know that we have the same ideas floating around in our heads and blogging about them allows us to learn and grow from each other.
My Favorite Posts
It was so great to read all of the other posts by my coworkers. I learned so much and I think we created some really great resources for the community. Here are some of my favorites:
- Remi Corson – The French Community in the WordPress Ecosystem. I had no idea how many awesome French WordPress developers were out there. This post introduced me to a few of them.
- Coen Jacobs – Why We Are Taking Features Away in WooCommerce 2.1. This post was a great reference for some of my posts and I think it's a great reference for the WordPress community as well. It's very helpful to understand the methodology behind the software you're using so you understand where it will go in the future.
- Mike Jolley – Avoiding Feature Bloat in Plugins. This is similar to Coen's post and reflects what I was talking about earlier about all of us pinging ideas off of each other and constantly building and expanding on a topic. Love it.
- Magnus Jepsen – The Path of Least Resistance. This was a great post explaining why Magnus (one of the founders of WooThemes) is choosing to use Medium over WordPress for this blogging contest.
#WTBFB == Success
So all in all I think this contest was a huge success! Daniel Espinoza deserves a huge thank you for helping me learn some things about myself, learn things about my coworkers, and for inspiring us to create 100+ posts.