A to Z 2013 - reflection post

I have to tell you I am still hungover from this year's A to Z, and dragging of my carcass to the computer to sit down and write this reflection post has been quite the undertaking. But the glass of wine beside me is helping me stay in the moment. hehe.

Reflection

Yep, folks, I did survive 2013's A-Z challenge, and it's my third successful challenge to date. In 2011 I flew by the seat of my pants and did random posts, which you can check out here. Last year, my theme was an A-Z list of books from my GoodReads "to-read" shelf, which can be found here.

This year I focused on sharing an A-Z of Australian music. Many Aussie musicians, even our most well-known who have enjoyed international success, are not that well known globally, so I wanted to introduce the blogging world to some of my favourite (or other people's favourite) Aussie-penned tunes. I had a lot of fun this year and was glad to be able to fixate on one of my greatest loves - music - but I also found it quite a challenge and very time-consuming.

The posting: I didn't have anything pre-written, so each night when I came home from work I had to a) whittle down my list of songs (I have over 12k of songs in iTunes, to make the meaning of that a little clearer) to just Aussie songs b) choose which songs I thought worthy of sharing c) hunt on YouTube for videos for said songs, and c) compose my post for the day with links 'n all.

The visiting/commenting: My aim at the start of April was, quite seriously, to visit every single blog on the list. I wasn't really counting on the fact that a) sometimes one single blogger would have up to 6 different links in that list, leading to different blogs they were maintaining, and b) that is just a whole lotta blogs. Visiting 66 blogs a day did seem manageable, but really I was kidding myself there. I started out strong...ish...but soon enough I realised I had to get picky. In the end I mostly visited those who kept visiting me and commenting.

Reasons I may not have left you a comment:

• You had DISQUS comments enabled - at home these don't seem to work for me at all, so I can't even load your comments section
• You had 6 different blogs in the "master list", and I had already commented on 2 or more of them
• Your website was so high-tech and fancy that I couldn't even get it to load
• Your blog had so many posts about different things within one single day that I found it really difficult to even find any of your A to Z posts
• I couldn't find your blog at all! You don't have it linked on your Blogger or Google+ profile, and I couldn't even find you on Google (obviously this was if you had left me a comment and I was trying to do so in return)
• I gave up on the big list before even getting to the section your blog was in. Sorry! But  if this was you, see my P.S. at the end of the post :)

I was also tempted to give up on a fair few CAPTCHA-plagued blogs, but because I had taken that precious time to stop by, I generally persevered. I did wind up stopping posting on most religious-themed blogs, 'cause, ya know, I'm atheist.

What would make me want to return to your blog?

• I knew that you wrote fairly short posts for each letter!
• You kept coming back to my blog and leaving comments!
• Your theme was super groovy in my oh so humble estimations. :)

Anyway...all in all this year's A-Z was a good experience, but I did find it quite exhausting. Then again, that's nothing new. I'm exhausted after every A to Z season is done! It's still well worth doing, in my book. ;)

P.S. If I never visited your blog during April but you'd like me to, leave me a comment and I WILL come and visit you. And if you already left me a comment and I still didn't visit you back, let me know that too and I will leave you at least 2 comments in return. :) I promise!

P.P.S. I finished my wine. :( But there is more in the fridge. :)