The 2026 edition of Blaugust- the festival of blogging is wrapping up. This is my third year participating, and I started with fairly modest goals:
- Post at least five times (the “bronze” level of the event) with with a stretch goal of posting at least once for each of my three blogs
- secondary goal: keep my posts short with most being around 500 words
- Complete the requirements for the “Community Builder” achievement
I achieved and exceeded my goals by some margin.
Posting goals
I managed to post over 40 times during Blaugust, a new record for me and sufficient to acquire the highest level of achievement: The Rainbow Diamond award. Here are the raw numbers across my three blogs:
- Ubergeek Kelly’s World: 39 posts
- Words of the AgingGamer: 9 posts
- Geek on a Harley: 1 post
I would say that most of my posting energy comes from two factors. First and by far foremost is the fact that I had a metric ton of inspiration that I drew from other bloggers in the festival. This is evidenced by my fulfillment of one of the challenges I achieved in the Community Builder award, that being to have at least five posts inspired by others. The other factor is that I devoted a lot of time to blogging, probably averaging two or three hours per day excluding the time I spent reading other people’s blog posts.
I also maintained a pretty good practice of keeping my posts short. I don’t have an average word count for the month but eyeballing it I’d say I’m somewhere around 750 words per post on average
Community builder
To repeat Krikket– Community builders will meet at least three of the following challenges:
- Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form
- Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question
- DONE: by my counting I have 12 posts of my total here that were inspired by other Blaugust participants. All of them have link/pingbacks
- Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week. Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social mediaÂ
- DONE: I read posts daily, clicked likes, left comments on blogs, and was involved in a few discussions in the Blaugust Discord
- Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours!
- DID NOT DO
- Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day.
- DONE: I participated in two group projects, the Dungeon Crawler Carl achievement post and the Wished for superpower post.
I didn’t really struggle with any of the challenges other than maybe a bit with the group project. I had to read at least one Dungeon Crawler Carl book in August to complete the challenge and I read five (!) of the blasted things, almost derailing my Blaugust participation early. I managed to find a rhythm that allowed me to keep on with my addictive reading while still keeping my writing on track- barely.
Statistics
WordPress numbers
I compared to last year as that is more interesting to me than comparing August to (for example) July of this year. Clearly my blog was more active this year than last, which is probably a good indication of the benefits of posting regularly. I’m still seeing weird traffic spikes in July of each year: this year it came on July 28th for some reason, whereas last year it came on July 10. Again, I’m not looking at July this year- it gives me a headache. But for fun here are my full year 2025 and 2026 stats.
Google search stats
My Google stats have barely moved from 2025. I am largely of the opinion that Google does nothing for my blog whatsoever these days, essentially consigning it to a search engine black hole. The one good piece of news is that my site shows up somewhere around position 20 in the results which means that it is in the first couple of pages Google presents. I’m just not getting very many keyword hits for whatever people are looking for.
August 2026
August 2025
Google keywords
The most popular queries that included my site in the results seem to be related to Telus for some reason. None of those queries generated a click, so obviously my blog is showing up in less popular queries as well and getting some clicks there.
The strange query keywords that end up showing my blog are obviously not helping me very much: “telus nah” indeed. But at least I recognize a few of the queries as being related to things I’ve written about which is good.
Summation
Blaugust has done nothing but good things for my site in 2026. I would also say that it has done good things for me as well by giving me a daily objective to work on and a good sense of positive feedback to take joy in.
I accomplished all of the goals I set out to achieve and exceeded my total post count objective by about 800%. I have doubt whether I will ever achieve this level of posting frequency again: it is just too much for me to sustain for an entire month. But I also feel like I learned some things about my own capabilities as a writer in the process. In particular I am proud that I was able to maintain a pattern of short posts instead of my usual extended length missives. It got to the point where writing something over 1,000 words felt like the real challenge which, in truth, is as it should be.
I feel like I have taken some steps to make my site more accessible for the average user by fixing some issues with the comments section. I don’t think, however, that this has really brought very many new people to my blog. It still seems as if the people on Facebook that I share links to this blog with see it there and don’t click through very frequently. I have to put that down to human behaviour I guess.
Overall I got more out of Blaugust than I put in. I enjoyed reading other blogs and took inspiration from many of the posts I saw. I’m thankful for the Festival of Blogging and feel fortunate to have been able to participate.
