It’s here! September 30th! The last day of Septemblog! I can now proudly say that for the first time in around 15 years of blogging I have successfully completed a blog-a-day challenge.

I completely failed my supplementary challenge to leave 5 comments / follow someone new every day, and it’s probably best you don’t look at my ‘official’ septemblog page, but if I’d made that compulsory I’d have definitely failed weeks ago.

That said, if you’re trying to increase your comments, hits or overall engagement, setting yourself the X comments on blogs per day goal is a must. It shot my hits up, which just goes to show that when bloggers say “commenting is dead”, what they actually mean is “I can’t be arsed to comment any more”.

Engagement has also gone up on my blog Facebook page, with more likes and more posts reaching a greater number of people. I’m not sure if that’s Facebook being clever with some sort of frequency == relevancy algorithm, or whether it’s just the inevitable more posts == more likely to post something someone will want to read.

I did write another blog post today, one that is less ‘meta’ and less cheaty, but I’m keeping that to myself for the time being as I’m not sure my idea will take off yet. You’ll just have to wait and see for that one. In the mean time, yay septemblog!

Would it be controversial of me to suggest that failing to teach your children to cook is neglecting a hugely important of parenting? That is, missing out a huge part of a range of life skills that should be imparted upon your kids. As I lovingly prepared a homemade lasagne earlier (by which I mean… read full entry »

After asking you beautiful people for blog post suggestions yesterday, you dutifully provided me with several of which I will no doubt make use of a couple over last few days of Septemblog. Aisling‘s suggestion to do a “what’s in your bag” post would work well if I was like any of the other millions… read full entry »

Yep, four days left in September and I’m getting seriously meta up in here: blogging about blogging about blogging. I don’t know whether it’s just the fact that I’ve been seriously rushed off my feet for the past week or so, what with travelling to and from Brighton for the SEO conference and then fitting… read full entry »

As I rapidly approach my 30th birthday I seem to spend more and more time thinking about things that have already happened. I don’t like to live in the past, and I’m not one for dwelling on regrets, but I think it’s important to recognise where we’ve come from and the things we’ve done, so… read full entry »

I’m currently stealing wifi from Gaz’s work in Shrewsbury having spent the day at the last Shropgeek (r)evolution conference. As the last talk – by Andrew Clarke – came to an end I got thinking about my origins in web development. In some ways it doesn’t seem like 5 minutes since I was publishing my… read full entry »

Having announced my intention to return to 100% freelance from October, it might therefore be surprising to hear that I’m also going to be attempting a pretty radical goal to try and drastically increase the amount saved to use against my mortgage balance: I am going to try and put away half of every paid… read full entry »

I’ve mentioned a couple of times this month that I’ve been working with a client for a dedicated 8 hours a week to give me a little bit of fixed income and gets me out of the house twice a week. Despite needing to get out of the house, I’ve decided to change the arrangement:… read full entry »

I’ve just been moaning on twitter about hitting a bit of a ‘blogging wall’ after 3 weeks of doing pretty well on my Septemblog challenge. In doing so, it occurred to me how lucky I am that — minor ‘every day’ life niggles aside — the only thing I can think of to moan about… read full entry »

I’ve just seen this tweet on twitter (obvious statement is obvious): https://twitter.com/tattooed_mummy/status/646050199220146176 which got me thinking about spiders, as you do (and also wondering where that little guy’s other leg got to?) They’re a hot topic in our house at the moment as it’s that time of year where they seem to appear on every… read full entry »