#Blogtober Recap!

 

Posts in the #blogtober series:

1. #Blogtober Recap!
2. VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 2
3. VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 3
4. Finding out which VM’s have snapshots using VMware PowerCLI
5. Still running vCenter Operations Manager 5.x? The time to Upgrade is NOW!

 

At the beginning of October I saw this tweet and blog post from Matt Heldstab about #blogtober which in essence was a challenge to tech bloggers to write 5 blog posts in 31 days during October.

Motivation

I was slowly increasing the number of blog posts I was writing month on month where on average I was creating 3 posts per month, however with VMworld Europe taking place in September I felt that I could write more content and so I signed up for the challenge.  Another reason for signing up was to increase my virtual presence and awareness as well as potentially increase traffic + visitors to the blog.  I can say that October has generated the most visits since I started earlier this year, in addition I have gained some more twitter followers as well.

Review

Now with a busy day job, evening meetings and wanting to relax on weekends it was not that easy to get 5 posts created in 31 days but I am happy to say I have achieved it!

Another aspect with having to write 5 posts in a specific number of days puts an element of additional pressure on you as you start to wonder what you will blog about as ideally the content needs to be unique and you do not want to “reinvent the wheel”!

#1 + 2
The first 2 posts were relatively easy as they were focused on VMworld Europe and my personal highlights.

 

#3
The 3rd post was mainly luck and some good timing as this post had been in draft for some time waiting for the pull request for my PowerCLI script to be accepted so once it was I just had to add final touches and then submit.

At the halfway point of the #blogtober challenge I was mid table with 3 posts which I thought was quite an achievement considering I was up against seasoned tech bloggers!

 

#4
The 4th post was again opportunistic as I was noticing a trend with Support Requests being opened for vCenter Operations Manager and I felt it was important to re-iterate that our customers should be upgrading to vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1 as vCOps is no longer supported and has reached End of General Support (EOGS) status.   Unfortunately I was unable to fit the #Blogtober hashtag into my tweet so this was not credited in the results.

 

#5
My 5th and final post is what you are reading now and this provides a good overview of the #blogtober challenge and what I have been able to achieve in 31 days, coincidentally this is being posted on Day 31!

Overall I believe that I passed the #blogtober challenge and can say it was an interesting experience.  I am still hoping to continue to blog at least 3 times a month although this may fluctuate and this time next year I plan to sign up again for #blogtober.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment or message me on twitter (@lukaswinn) if you found this article useful.

–Lukas