Blogging from A to Z: Reflections

Ah! This was supposed to go up yesterday! I post on time, every day, for a month... but then can't make a one-off deadline. :P

Ok, so during the month of April, I took part in the "Blogging A to Z Challenge." We are asked to debrief at the end to give feed back to the creators. I noticed that some people did this the day after it ended and here I am a week later... I was busy, ok? Had an epic birthday weekend celebrating 3 family birthdays. Got one more coming up this next weekend. :)


Here are some of the items they listed as possible reflections:

• How did your journey through the alphabet go? Did you meet new bloggers with similar interests? Are there any you would like to feature and share with others?
•  It was really fun. I like being challenged and love doing research. I didn't go to in-depth this time but it did still take some work to find items for all my themes each day. I did find some awesome bloggers that I will continue to follow! I think I'll do another post with an A to Z blogroll.
• What were the highlights for you? (lowlights too...we want to hear it all)
• My favourite parts were playing with photos from my personal collection and friends for the 'country of the day'.
  
• Did you enjoy posting daily? What was your biggest hurdle? What was your easiest task?
•  I had my posts mostly written out before the month actually started and I added photos in once or twice a week to stay on top of things so it didn't really feel like I was doing the work daily. I was obsessively checking my stats, though. :P
• Was time management an issue? (I know, silly question, when isn’t time management an issue - but, it is worth reflecting on)
• No more than usual... (see above)
  
• And what about your content - did you have a theme or did you wing it? Was it easy to come up with ideas for each letter, or were some harder? 
• My theme was sort of an 'evening in' with a wine, cheese and fruit plus a book, music album and movie of the day and then added the country of the day just before it started. Thanks to various wikis I could do the research fairly easily. Some letters had more options to play with, though.
• How about commenting - did you stumble upon lots of sites still using word verification? Did this prevent you from leaving a comment? What worked for your blog? 
• I turned off CAPCHA and got no spam comments myself. Most blogs did not have CAPTCHA on. I do it anyway. I like the challenge of trying to get those things right. :P And sometimes they make me laugh.
• What will you do different next year? (Yes, you are doing this next year, you know you are, even if your brain is telling you to run for the hills - it appreciates the exercise)
• I plan to do it next year. It will probably be very different. I'm fairly new to blogging so still finding my voice. This was an experiment for me in a lot of ways.
• What pearls of wisdom do you want to share with the Co-Hosts of this event? (We would love to hear from you and know what you think would make this awesome event even better)
• If possible, I would find it helpful if the linky list could have a brief description or tag line for each of the blogs participating. There is no way I had time to get through the full list but I might have found more appropriate blogs to follow if I had some idea what I was clicking on. :) Maybe have an additional blog post where everyone could be listed with a small summary or something...

 So, there you have it. Good times had by all!