Week 157 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2020-10-26.
I take the anniversary of 1 Thing A Week as an opportunity to look back and see how far it has come. This is now my third retrospective and there's a part of me that can't believe that I've actually made it this far.
The premise was simple, but could I keep it up? Having failed at blogging many times over, it was easy to pessimistic but I gave it a go anyway. In the past, I had never been happy with the format or the tools and it always fizzled out after a small bang but this time it's stuck.
Why is that?
The 'CMS' behind 1 Thing A Week is minimal. It would probably be unusable for anyone else, but it works perfectly for me. No frills, it gets the job done and is flexible enough for me to extend when I need to. I have full control over the content created which was a sticking point with off-the-shelf solutions. It will always be a work in progress but I'm never at the mercy of someone else's decisions.
The second reason for this being so successful from a content creation perspective is that this time there's some sort of plan in place. I have a list of topics I want to talk about and there are callbacks I can now make to previous content. When the list is low or my time is limited then there's always the opportunity to cover more ordinary things that don't need a massive commentary but will hopefully be of interest to any visitors.
Changes this year
There are have been various functional enhancements to the site this year but they've mostly been under the hood. The biggest change was something more psychological my perspective.
My previous blogging attempts were approached as either a magazine style or a semi-personal blog that ended up containing lots of things. 1 Thing A Week started off no different, but has evolved into something more personal. Because I am limiting myself to 1 Thing A Week, each post is treated equally and given a week to live on its own before moving to the archive. Notable items have made this a much more enjoyable adventure and made the whole thing much more sticky from a content creation perspective.
To make it more personal, I'm now focusing a portion of what I write on topics that are related to my profession; web development. I've been doing a short series on CSS patterns and I've been writing about experiments with Linked Data. I didn't think I had enough to say on the topic but it turns out that it's good to share.
It wasn't until week #132 that I really kicked off writing more topics about web development and I'm looking forward to writing more.
As you can see, the most popular tag I've used is Apple which surprised me. Apple is a company I'm interested in the success of and they make the devices I use daily. Development scrapes into the top 5, but I really want to change that as we approach 2021.
Last words
Having said all of that and as 1 Thing A Week celebrates its third year, I've moved into a new role at a new company. It's going to bring a whole load of new challenges which may even inspire topics but the intention is still to touch on CSS as it's an aspect of web development I really enjoy.
Thanks for reading, especially if you've been here before over the past 3 years. Here's to many, many more.
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Tags: anniversary , infographic, anniversary , infographic