From December 1st to December 24th, also known as advent or pre-Christmas period, in quite a few countries there is the tradition of having an advent calendar. In the digital time we are living in, this tradition also found its way to blogs. Over the last years, several bloggers realized an advent calendar, where they published one new post per day, starting on the first day of December and ending on Christmas Eve.
This post offers a suggestion for people who enjoy reading these advent calendar posts, but are unable, for whatever reason, to participate in an advent calendar theirselves, while they still want to give back and say thanks in some way.
The Advent(ure)
The underlying idea is pretty simple. Here is some short explanation anyway.
How Does It Work?
Every single day in the advent, you select one blog post you liked (or did not like), and leave a comment. That’s it.
If you can’t make it on every single day, you can also leave two or more comments on one day, and none on another. As long as you leave a total of 24 comments in the name of this game, all is good.
Also, this does, of course, not mean you cannot leave more than 24 comments during the advent. Just to have mentioned that… 😉
Why Would I Want to Do This?
A lot of time goes into writing one blog post. Now imagine 24, in 24 consecutive days. This is an effort that should get rewarded somehow.
And who knows? Maybe you really have something interesting or even important to say, and start a discussion that leads to more comments or even yet another blog post…
What to Comment?
If you want to follow along the pre-Christmas spirit, you might want to select one post a day from any blog advent calendar you come across. It doesn’t have to be the post from the very day, but could be any post from the advent calendar.
If you don’t know (enough) blog advent calendars or really don’t like any of the posts, you can also comment any other regular post, of course.
Feelin’ Tweety?
Think this is a nice idea worth sharing? Well, then tweet about it.
You can either share this post, or all of the ones you just commented. To bundle all these tweets, and thus make them easier to find for other people, always include the hashtag #24DaysOfComments in all your tweets. Thanks.
Advent Calendars in 2017
If you can’t find blogs with an advent calendar, here is a (growing) list for you:
- 24 Accessibility
- 24 ways
- A React Christmas
- GatherContent
- Inpsyde
- Kau-Boys
- KrautPress (German)
- realloc’s asylum (German)
- Torsten Landsiedel (German)
- UXmas
If you know some blog that is not yet included here, please tell me. It doesn’t have to be about software engineering or even WordPress, but could be anything!
Now It’s Your Turn!
So, comment away then. 🙂
Oh my, it’s already December 3rd, the first candle of the Advent wreath is already lit but I haven’t written a comment yet…
Joking aside, we certainly should all be more intensively enganged in the exchange of knowledge. Sometimes it just takes a while to digest new input from blog posts, but be assured, that I (as certainly many others) read every line, try to make most out of it, share that new knowledge myself and maybe respond, if a comment doesn’t sound too silly. That’s probably better than just commenting for the sake of checking off a todo list?
Oh, by the way… will you publish a new post today? I mean, it’s already December 3rd…
(Sorry, Thorsten, just kidding.)
Hi Bego,
you are absolutely right that leaving meaningful comments is, by far, more useful than just leaving comments for the sake of checking off a todo list. I absolutely didn’t mean to suggest the #24DaysOfComments initiative as this kind of stupid todo list, though. Maybe I should have made that a little more clear…
On the other hand, however, sometimes something like “This was (great) news to me.” or “I really like what you did here.” or even just a simple “Thanks for writing this.” can brighten the day of the respective author. 🙂
Cheers,
Thorsten