A-Z Challenge - 2018 - Reflection

A look back at this years A-Z Challenge

May 6, 2018 by cryan.com

This is my third year as part of the A to Z challenge. It was a lot of fun coming up with practical content with a unique letter every day. Obviously, I didn't want to repost old content.

http://www.cryan.com/az/

Things I learned new this year

• Advanced content planning helped a lot. There were a few last minute content changes that had to be made due to the lack of information (or the chosen topic wasn't interesting.) I started planning in early March.
• The alphabetic letters for Thursday were the same as last year. It was a bit challenging since Thursday is Boston day and this is the third year that I have been doing this.
• I learned a lot about Quaker Ave, and would not have learned anything about it had it not been for the A-Z challenge.
• It was hard to come up with topics for the letters 'G' and 'V' and I had to get a bit creative to blog something interesting. I didn't want to throw up a page just because.
• I certainly wouldn't do Evernote as a blog topic again. It's not a good topic with a lot of different alphabetic words.
• There were 697 participants this year. Which is a good turnout.

What to do differently in 2019

• Come up with better graphics
• Work with other people to come up with useful topics
• Post early as possible. It was a lot easier to chunk multiple topics than to spend time writing one topic.
• Plan the topics a head of time. Make sure to pick something that has lots of choices.
• Challenge yourself to do something that you wouldn't normally do. For example: Talk to an expert about a topic/idea.

Interesting Facts

Here's the break down of the number of words by first letter in the Unix dictionary (/etc/dict) by number of words:

Its interesting to see which words have the fewest letters.

What do you think? Did the content in April meet expectations? Any ideas about what topics to write about for next year?