2021-12-31, TEC

December 2021

Looking back on my first year of blogging

Just over eight months ago, I kicked off This Month in Org with an emphatic announcement of the blog’s in the form of a Welcome post. If you haven’t guessed, this is the first “blog post” I’ve ever written. In that welcome post, I gave my motivation for starting the blog — essentially to bridge a perceived gap in information sources between a subscription to the Org project mailing list, and nothing.

That is why I thought this blog should exist, but until now I have neglected to mention what I want to accomplish with it. By starting TMiO I hoped to:

• Engage more people with the improvements being made to Org¹.
• Highlight some of the great work being done by Org¹ contributors.
• Encourage more people to consider contributing to Org¹.
• Foster a stronger sense of an Org¹ community, outside the mailing list.

Since then, I’ve effused about Org to the tune of around ten thousand words. We started off with a fairly dry recount recent changes, which (after initial feedback) has shifted slightly to try to give more context on the improvements and how they may be used. In June I even went as far as to make the majority of the post about pre-existing features (writing Org for LaTeX). This change has been made to:

• Try to make the blog posts a little more interesting, and less tedious.
• Potentially introduce readers to nice features of Org they weren’t aware of before.

We have now arrived at the first crucial question of this post: How effective has this blog been in achieving its goals?

Let’s start off by looking at engagement. There is no tracking on this site, and I’m not even counting page views. We could read into Reddit upvotes (which usually hover around 100-ish per post), but with no strong trend I’m wary of reading too much into those numbers. What about engendering an interest in contributing? This is even harder to consider. It is similarly difficult to judge whether this blog might be helping (even if only a bit) foster a stronger sense of community.

Ok, how about the second crucial question: Moving forwards, what changes should I make to the style of posts, if any?

Hmmm, this is a prickly one too. Both of these questions suffer from the same problem — I can’t answer them. Simply put, I need to hear from you. Whether it be in the Reddit comments section, or by Email (tec@ this domain), to direct 2022’s posts I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on:

• How engaging you’ve found this blog? (the content, the style of writing, etc.)
• Whether this blog has influenced your feelings on the Org project and/or community?
• Whether this blog has affected your thoughts on contributing to Org?
• What you think this blog has done well/badly over the past year?
• If there’s anything you’d be interested in this blog doing differently in 2022?

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading, and have a great new year 🙂