I only discovered Blaugust when August was almost over. Which is slightly unfortunate, because I like the idea.
Blaugust is one of those wonderfully IndieWeb-ish initiatives where people encourage each other to blog more. See for more here: https://tagn.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/. It originally started as a challenge to publish every day during August, although over the years it has become somewhat less strict. The idea now seems to be at least as much about participating, meeting other bloggers and keeping personal blogging alive.
Sebastian Malloy participated this year and wrote an interesting post about what the experience taught him (https://sebastianmalloy.bearblog.dev/what-blaugust-has-taught-me-about-my-blogging/). He managed 30 posts in 31 days, but discovered that producing something simply because today’s post still had to be produced wasn’t really for him. Some posts felt as if they existed mainly because there was a quota to meet. What he did enjoy was reading what everybody else had written.
I didn’t participate in Blaugust. There are several reasons for that. The most obvious one is that I already publish something on Just Me almost every day. So adding a challenge to make me write regularly would be slightly odd. The other reason is much simpler: I discovered Blaugust too late. Maybe next time.
There is a whole world of these things
What surprised me is that Blaugust isn’t some isolated event. There appears to be an entire world of challenges built around the simple idea of committing yourself to making things.
There is 100 Days To Offload, for example, where the challenge is to publish 100 posts on your personal blog within 365 days (https://100daystooffload.com/). And the rules explicitly say those posts don’t have to be long, profound or particularly polished. The important part is to write.
Then there is the IndieWeb Carnival (https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Carnival). Every month another blogger chooses a subject and other bloggers write their own posts about it. At the end of the month, the host collects the contributions. The IndieWeb wiki actually describes one of its purposes as motivating people to publish more on their personal websites and giving them inspiration for things to write about.
And there are many more. The DS106 Daily Create (https://daily.ds106.us/) offers small daily creative assignments involving photography, drawing, audio, video and writing. There are similar initiatives for musicians, pixel artists, zine makers and people building websites. There is even a site that collects these challenges.
And, of course, there is NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month (https://nanowrimo2.com/), probably the best-known variation on the general idea: commit to creating something, set yourself a target and do it together with other people.
In other languages we see the same (more or less). In Germany there are quite of few challenges as well. See for example here https://judithpeters.de/50-blogparaden-im-sommer-2026/. I found fewer direct French-language blogging equivalents. There are plenty of French community writing challenges, though. For example, Scribonautes (https://scribonautes.fr/a-propos/) runs ongoing “défis d’écriture” where participants respond to community-created prompts and read and vote on each other’s work. It is closer to creative writing than personal blogging, but the community/regular-creation principle is very similar.
I find all this fascinating. Not necessarily because I need somebody to tell me to write another blog post. At the moment, I have rather the opposite problem. There are far more things I want to write about than I have time for. But these challenges provide something else. They are a very nice way to discover people. You follow links to participants, encounter blogs you have never seen before and suddenly end up reading about someone’s record collection, Linux setup, garden, travels, books or strange little hobby you didn’t know existed. That might actually be the most interesting part.
But what if you have nothing to say?
There is another side to all this. Sebastian Malloy’s experience also points to an obvious problem with publishing challenges: what happens when you simply have nothing you consider interesting enough to publish? I recently came across this post, Why People Quit Blogging (see here: https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/27/why-people-quit-blogging/), which looks at some of the reasons people eventually stop.
It certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think the question itself is interesting. Starting a blog is easy. Continuing one for years is something else entirely. Perhaps you run out of subjects. Perhaps life changes. Perhaps writing starts feeling like an obligation. Or perhaps you begin wondering whether anybody is actually interested in what you have to say.
Challenges such as Blaugust, 100 Days To Offload and the IndieWeb Carnival can probably help with that. They provide a reason to sit down again. A subject. A small deadline. And, importantly, other people who are doing exactly the same thing.
Your readers notice when you disappear
But I think there is another reason to keep going that bloggers themselves may underestimate. What bloggers perhaps don’t always realise is that readers aren’t only interested in subjects. Over time, they also become interested in you. They want to know what you have discovered. What you are doing. What you think about something. Which book you are reading. Which piece of software you are experimenting with. Or why something completely ordinary suddenly caught your attention.
That creates a small social connection. It is very different from following a professional publication where another author can simply take over. A personal blog has a person attached to it. That person is part of the reason people return. And once you establish some kind of rhythm, people get used to that rhythm too. If it suddenly changes, I suspect some regular readers really do notice. Not necessarily in a dramatic way. Nobody will organise a search party because you haven’t published anything for four days. But perhaps there is a tiny moment of disappointment when they check your blog or their RSS reader and there is nothing new. Oh. You’re not here today.
I think that is rather nice. And perhaps that small relationship between writer and reader is something worth remembering whenever blogging starts to feel like talking into an empty room.