Looking Back At This Month's Blogging...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

March has been a hard month when it's come to blogging, thanks in large part to a succession of overlapping winter illnesses (culminating in food poisoning, which lasted well over a week).

This, in turn, messed with my head, kneecapping my confidence and immersing me in a frustrating fog of confusion, that had me doubting every decision and constantly second-guessing myself.

Not only did this play merry havoc with any ideas I had for working on a possible RPG campaign for the Tuesday Knights (NB. I still haven't reached any solid conclusions), but my grand project to review a couple of Tintin albums a month (so I could cover the complete canon in a year) has already ground down to a single review a month (for March it was Cigars of The Pharaoh).

That said, the review is gaining a lot of traction, but it's hard to gauge its real success because my monthly tally of popular posts got screwed up at the start of March by a tidal wave of bots doing a drive-by on HeroPress.

As actual hits on posts are in the crapper these days, even though the bot wave only stayed for a day or two, it meant the random articles they'd decided to visit were amped up to insurmountable levels, dominating the Top Ten posts for the month.

I'd hoped that would be it and after 30 days things would return to normal.

However, annoyingly, just today, I noticed that a couple of these old posts were attracting interest again.

So I methodically went through all the posts that got some bot love this month and "reverted them to draft", so they wouldn't be able to draw any more bots to them.

I'll leave it like that for a few weeks and see if our unwanted guests move on.

Despite all this, I still managed to break the "100 posts in a month" barrier for the first time this year, despite many factors working against me, although I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep that rate up for another month. 

Guess we'll have to see what excitement April brings.

Even with a resurgence in my blogging enthusiasm towards the end of the month, I'm still occasionally finding the whole process like running through treacle and I can't help but wonder if I'm just wasting my time these days?

To be honest, the allure of vegging in front of the telly and letting 'my stories' wash over me could still win out. 

For instance, the brilliant current season of Picard has fired my interest for watching Voyager again (I know I'm in a minority but I love that iteration of the Trek franchise)... and Paramount Plus does have all  the Star Trek!

I know several of my peers are taking part in the annual A to Z Blogging Challenge, which I am consistently too disorganised to get my shit together for.

I wish my friends good fortune and an ability to stay to the course.

Maybe one year I'll actually be disciplined enough to participate. 

Maybe...