Bloguidien #1: My favorite blog posts or series of posts

Today, well yesterday as it is past midnight already, 2 French bloggers, Lord and Dryusdan, started a new challenge called bloguidien (a mix between “blog” and “quotidien” which means “daily” in French). A new topic is published every day on the website to inspire bloggers to write more.

I’ve written multiple times that I usually don’t participate to such “challenges”. Or at least not regularly. I’ve participated once to the IndieWeb Carnival (and missed the september one that I also wanted to write about) but that was it. I’m participating to the extend a given topic inspire me and I don’t feel the pressure to write just to participate. Even more so with daily challenge like this one, as I know I will not have the motivation each day to participate.

But the first topic is « Quelle est l’article / la série de ton blog que tu apprécies le plus ? », which translates to « What is your favorite blog post/series? ». And while I don’t intend to participate daily, this topic is linked to a recurrent thought since I added the ability to flag posts as featured. Featured posts are displayed at the top of my homepage and on a dedicated featured posts page.

I decided to take the opportunity to write about this, mixing this current reflection with this topic of the day. And because I write here in English, I will participate in English to this French challenge… I’ve often thought about writing some things in French here, but writing about this multilingual “problem” might be better for the October IndieWeb Carnival (the topic being « multilingualism in a global Web »). Maybe another post for this month, who knows :).

Anyway, back to the bloguidien’s topic (or close enough).

As I said, I now have the featured flag that I can add to my post when publishing them. And that raised the question, each time I write something, to flag it or not as featured. Why should I flag one post and not another one? Does that mean I prefer the post itself? Or at least the topic of that post? Or just because I want that one to be more visible than others? Most of the time, it’s more a feeling that factual reasons.

Yesterday’s post (Last night the backup saved my life 🎵) is a featured post… Even though it isn’t particularly well written or doesn’t explain anything in depth… Just because I liked it and was so happy that, indeed, backups saved my ass from the failed update of my computer.

Sometime, I flag articles just to give them a bit more visibility, such as the update of my gpg key or the change of my matrix homeserver. Nothing to really learn from those either, but at least they were at the top of my homepage for a while. Other time, I flag posts that I do think have valuable information or talk about technical stuff in depth where I put more effort writing them, such as the unnecessary complex deployment workflows posts or the content statistics one that took more time to write. Or more personal deep posts can be flagged as well, such as facing my digital worse nightmare which took a lot of mental energy to write but helped me go through that tough period.

Again, no specific rules to flag any of these articles, just feeling on the moment of writing…

Coming back to the bloguidien’s topic, this time for real, how to choose my favorite one? Does it have to be a featured article? Would it be crazy from me to say my favorite article (or series) is not even flagged as featured on my blog?

I’m going to do it anyway and choose a series as my favorite: the homeautomation 2020 edition. And the main reason isn’t because it was the best posts, but maybe the ones where I had the most fun building and writing them. Granted I don’t do any home automation anymore since I moved to a new city, but that was one fun ride for sure! And there will most probably be another edition in a future apartment / house!

Also, a special mention to facing my digital worse nightmare post, which was really personal and helped me go through a tougher period. Many times I wanted to write more personal posts like this but often stopped myself. But this one was deeply needed to get over that nightmare, so I must mention it too.

As often, when not writing about something technical, this post went in many directions, some close enough of the bloguidien challenge, some very far… But that’s how I write I guess 🤷.

And you (even non French blogger), which post(s) you wrote do you like the most?