This April I participated in the A to Z blog challenge. This was my second foray into the challenge, having first completed it in April, 2013. One difference this year is that I volunteered as a minion — someone who would commit to visiting a certain group of blogs every day so that each blogger would receive comments and visits. We were also charged with rooting out any blogs that were simply there for commercial purposes, as well as noting blogs that were not actually participating.

Although I had been given two groups of ten blogs to visit, I decided to branch out significantly and visit as many as possible. I ended up visiting over 600 blogs during the challenge. Visiting that many gave me a good sense for the types of blogs that are out there. One very popular type is the author blog, used as more or less a marketing tool for the person’s book(s). I greatly enjoyed a few of these.

As I experienced the first time around, I found some lovely people whose writing and philosophy resonated with me, and we are enjoying each other’s blog and comments. One in particular I think of is the Widow Badass at http://www.widowbadass.com. Another GREAT blog is http://www.mysteriouskaddu.com. Miss_terious wrote 26 blogs on blogging, and they were very well done.

One of the most beautiful blogs I visited was https://theartisticchristian.wordpress.com.

Visiting 600 blogs was pretty time-consuming, and I found myself wishing there was an easier way than simply opening each new blog in a new tab. It would have been great if I could have just clicked a “next” button to see the next one on the list. Another thought is I wish there were some way to change up the order of the list. It took me a good number of days working through the blogs one by one before I thought to jump down to the last hundred and work through those. I doubt that those blogs get as much traffic and their traffic would probably increase if they showed up in the list nearer the top.

I loved blogging a theme this month but I am also glad to be back to my regular style. I moved to a new platform this month, from Blogger to WordPress, which was a fantastic move. All in all, participating this year was enjoyable, a boost to my own blogging, and a great way to connect with others. I will definitely do it again.