badge

Unofficial A to Z Badge

Fandango20 Comments

As I mentioned here in my A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal post, I am going to be participating in the A to Z blogging challenge next month. But, like I did last year, I’m not going to be “officially” participating.

For those of you who formally sign up, complete the required Google spreadsheets, and follow all of the instructions, there is an official participation badge:

But, I imagine that, if you are going rogue, as I am, and not officially registering, the sponsors of the Challenge might not want you to use their official badge.

To that end, I have created an unofficial “Going Rogue” badge for you to use if you wish to.

Last year, Paula Light, who sadly (for the rest of us) left WordPress in August, created a very imaginative and colorful unofficial badge for those of us who went rogue and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind it if you wanted to use her badge.

Fandango’s Unofficial 2023 A to Z Blogging Challenge

Fandango19 Comments

So I went and created this badge (above) in anticipation of participating unofficially in this years A to Z Blogging Challenge. But then I saw that Paula Light, over at Light Motifs II, created her own badge (below) for those of us who, like her, are being rebellious and plan to participate in the A to Z Challenge but don’t plan to go through the rigamarole of actually registering for it or formally declaring a theme. I’m not sure what that Viking riding a grizzly bear is supposed to signify, but Paula’s badge is certainly more colorful and creative than mine, so I’m going to put my badge on ice and embrace Paula’s.

And now I have an important announcement to share with everyone. I have selected an unofficial theme for this year’s challenge: classic rock!

As a fan of classic rock, I will be selecting 26 of my favorite classic rock songs and will feature one each day in April (except for the first four Sundays of the month). And, as the A to Z rules require, I will start on April 1st with a song title that starts with the letter A and end on April 30th with a song that starts with the letter Z.

Once again, I’m going rogue and will not be registering my blog or my theme with the official A to Z Blogging Challenge site. I have created a category on my site, “A to Z Challenge 2023,” where you can, if you’re interested, view all of my A to Z classic rock-themed posts for this year’s challenge.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — March 19

Fandango28 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 19th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on March 19, 2015 on my old blog. It was about the A to Z blogging challenge, but this was before it was as formalized as it is today. Anyway, here’s that six year old post.

BATZAP Badge

As you may know, I will be participating in the Blogging from A to Z in April Challenge, albeit in an unofficial way, as I never formally signed up.

I think that “Blogging from A to Z in April” is a mouthful. So I came up with what I thought was a clever acronym: BATZAP. It leverages the first letter of most of the words in the longer title:

Blogging from A to Z in April

And then I thought to myself, not only does the A to Z Challenge need a clever acronym, it could really use a cool badge.

So here’s what I came up with.This is a first attempt, but I want to know what you think. Do you like it or does it need work?

If you like it, and if you’re doing the Blogging from A to Z in April Challenge — officially or unofficially — and wish to use this BATZAP badge in your own posts, feel free to grab it and use it.

Or, if you have any suggestions for how I might improve it, please let me know.

Update: due to personal circumstances at the time, I shut down my blog in April 2015, although I did get to the letter “I” on April 10th. I don’t remember if anyone embraced my acronym or my badge.

Feel Free to Use this Badge

Fandango111 Comments

With all of the unauthorized harvesting of our posts that is going on at tygpress.com and seemingly not much that can be done to stop it, I created this badge that I will attach to all of my blog posts going forward.EDC343BA-4E67-4F78-BDFB-02FE6D5C0A26Please feel free to grab this image and post it on your blog. By doing so, this image should show up on your posts that have been stolen by tygpress.

You’re welcome.

SoCS — Did You Notice?

Fandango21 Comments

Did you notice that I didn’t win Linda’s annual Stream of Consciousness Saturday badge contest? I know. Hard to believe, right. It turns out that my design came in fourth (out of ten).

But that’s okay because the winning badge, designed by Pamela, at A Chronicle of Hope, won. And her design was built around an actual water-based stream, whereas mine was based upon a stream of wispy clouds. So Pamela’s badge design was much more apropos for the prompt. Here it is. It’s really well done.8D53F4D3-B456-461F-BFAD-41536450817BSo congratulations, Pamela, on your big win.

On an entirely different topic, did you notice that ever since WordPress dropped its daily one-word prompt at the end of May, a bunch of bloggers, me included, started posting daily, one-word prompts? So now, instead of writing one post in response to each day’s WordPress one-word prompt, there are six or more one-word prompts to respond to.

But I just don’t have the bandwidth to compose and publish a separate post for each such one-word prompt. So I’ve taken to combining a bunch of them into a single post each day. I’ve been trying to weave somewhere between four and six daily word prompts into relatively short posts over the past couple of weeks.

I was even able to squeeze six prompts into a one-sentence post this past Wednesday. And just yesterday I fit eight prompts into a single post, although only six were one-word prompts and two were writing prompts.

I’m not sure how sustainable this multi-prompt approach is. So far I think my multi-prompt posts have hung together fairly well, but I’m concerned that they may start sounding forced or contrived and I sometimes wonder if the quality of my posts, by trying to cram multiple one-word prompts into single posts, will start to suffer.

Oh well, I’m just sort of thinking out loud, which means that you may notice that I have done my job in responding to Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where we are asked to use the word “notice.”