2025 Blaugust festival of blogging

Blaugust is a month-long blogging festival and it’s coming coming in a couple of weeks, starting August 1st and lasting the entire month of August.

It’s my third time participating: in 2023 I followed the festival’s weekly themes and in 2024 I blogged about Python’s wonderful standard library.

What is Blaugust?

Krikket at Nerd Girl Thoughts published the information and sign up sheet for this year’s event last week.

For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly.

Above all the goal of Blaugust has always been to prove to folks that they can in fact sit down every day and create something fresh and then share it with the world. Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past.

Our hope is to create a nurturing environment where Veteran bloggers can help those just getting started and the cross-pollination of ideas can create something truly spectacular. Your blog gives you a permanent foothold on the Internet that you own and have complete control of, and that is a really good feeling in the midst of shifting trends.

The original challenge that started the whole thing over a decade ago was to post 31 times in the 31 days of August. As time has passed and the community has grown, there are now different levels to aim for:

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2025.
Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2025.
Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2025.
Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2025.

Why participate?

I participate in Blaugust for a couple of reasons:

First, it helps me focus and write more. I usually blog every Wednesday and occasionally on other days of the week as well. Blaugust provides me a reason or an excuse to write a bit more. Looking back at what I’ve written in the past years as part of my Lessons learned posts, in 2023 I mentioned:

A major learning from this month was that I was able to do it in the first place. Around the end of the second week, I started to notice that I got better and better at just sitting down and starting to write.

I’ve always been an inspiration writer to the extent that usually at least once a week, opportunity and inspiration met and I managed to get a post done. This made writing for work sometimes challenging but after this month, I’m way more confident and comfortable writing when needed.

That gives me a lot of hope as I dream of one day being able to write for a living. Probably not as a full-time job but as a part of it.

That year was a great experiment in moving from inspiration-driven writing to a more sit-down-and-write approach and it gave me a lot of confidence when I found myself succeeding in that.

For last year, I took a different approach in that I spent more time before August in planning and prepping:

During the year, I kept a note in my notes system where I collected ideas, links, resources and example ideas to help make the month of August a smooth experience. In hindsight, that was a brilliant idea but I still feel I bit more than I could chew and didn’t prepare enough.

Second, we have a great community of writers. We have an active Discord community all year long so even outside the official festival month, there are fellow bloggers to chat with and to help each other out on inspirational and practical questions.

Publishing a blog is inherently a social act: we publish so others can read and it’s lovely to connect with other writers. It’s a peer support group as we’re all going through the same challenge.

Whether you already have a blog or decide to start one, I invite you to join the festival and the Discord server!