Finally, I get to not have to copy and paste into Edublogs. Phew.

Long... have I waited. And now, your coming-together, is your undoing... of being able to continue blogging. Who am I addressing right now? All of my peers who are relieved to stop blogging for life at the end of this project. I may be relieved, but for other reasons. Namely, now I don't have to rush to create a post on a day that I don't feel like it or it was too late, and also I don't have to remember to copy and paste the first paragraph plus a link on my "Edublog" class page so that my classmates get exposure to it and my teacher knows which posts do and don't qualify as Edublogs on this blog this month (in short, it's literally every single post I've put on this blog in March minus literally just one post written and published entirely by my new contributor, Xiang). Basically, if you have been confused throughout this month as to what an "Edublog" is, it's a post on a class blog for my English credit that I'm receiving extra credit for by doing every single day of the month. Now you know.

But to clarify: I have already been blogging for six years, and this is not the reason I started. I even had to clarify that right now since I don't usually post with this frequency. In fact, I'm very grateful that I even received this project since due to it, March of 2020 has been the single month within the past two years with the most amount of posts. I never would have expected to be able to post every single day of a month during the school year, and it would even be a big accomplishment during the summer. I tried to do that literally every single July, and was the most successful only maybe once or twice (one of which, July 2017, was the month in which I received my most amount of monthly views, with nearly 15 thousand in just one month). I got to blog in a month that historically I would be guaranteed to not post that much in recent years because of school, instead of not being able to do it because of school. School could stop me from blogging in the spring all those years, but not in my first year of high school. Ironic.

Let's reflect a bit on how this month has gone. I've posted every single day (yay!), but mostly about current events and my daily life (as per the project requirements) rather than clearing out my post draft bucket list (even though I did delete multiple no-longer relevant ones in the span of five minutes just for this post, hooray!: http://www.arcabaran.com/2020/03/RJ-bucket-list-quarantine.html). I've documented a bit about this historical quarantine that has already qualified my blog has a historical primary source (I know, crazy, right?). But despite all this, my monthly view count as of the moment I'm writing this isn't the highest it's been all year. In fact, two months in which I only made 1-3 posts, September and December of 2019, I was able to get just slightly less views in the former and 200 more in the latter! That's barely any more, but I'm not entirely surprised. This is my all-time view counter as of today, as it appears on my Blogger Stats page:

This month as of when I checked that page, I had gotten additional 4,254 views. In December of 2019, with only 3 quite-successful posts, I got 4454 additional views, or precisely 200 views more than I have gotten thus far this month. And, in September, I got 4152 views with barely any posts, which can be explained with a successful September 20th, 2019/Area 51 post as well as some additional momentum from my summer posts the month before that were still being viewed (this isn't unusual, on most days I may get anywhere from 40-300 views and the top posts in terms of views on just that day are always either some randomly successful post from two years ago that are still being viewed inexplicably, or if I made a new post that day, that would be near the top).

How is it that my blog has been getting read more the months in which I only post once or three times total compared to when I literally make an effort to post every single day? Well, there is a reason for this that I've already learned in my experience blogging. It's that unless you're the most popular person in the world, posts need space to breathe. You can't spend an hour or two writing one only for it to get instantly overshadowed the next day by a new post. This will decrease the amount of people who would view it subsequently by just clicking the newest post on your page. I have found workarounds for this, even during this month of daily "edublogs" and also over the summer. This would be Blogger's featured post feature, which lets you either default to the latest post or lets you cherry-pick a specific post that you want to be highlighted at the top as most significant, and then listing the rest of the posts not including that in the regular order that they would appear in otherwise. I have done this to let my big-effort posts, like collabs and reviews and significant events, stay at the top temporarily even when I make new posts that always appear just pixels beneath that one anyways.

In the summer, I'd find a good strategy to be to either post every other day, or to skip out on posting when it's just not necessary whatsoever. Being on a schedule, while it sounds great in concept, is like communism: In execution, I've found that for me it just doesn't work. Many of my friends and even my little brother Onur have tried such a thing, but I can't think of once when it's been 100% perfectly implemented. It may work for YouTubers and streamers, but writing is very different. You can record yourself any day of the week and just talk about something, even though I understand editing is involved, but a written publication gets more attention based on timely or relevant events specific to that certain day through ephemeral Google search or other search engine spikes, rather than the YouTube algorithm or an established fanbase doing all the work. There is no "blogging algorithm", even though certain mobile apps like Chrome and Google do have something like that for websites but most people don't actually pay attention to or use things like that, let's face it. 99% of blogs won't appear on Google News or Flipboard either, since they usually give priority to actual, established magazines and publications.

My favorite part of this Edublogs thing wasn't just the extra credit or that I got to write every single day and be able to justify it to my parents (who have a decently strict and early bed schedule for my brother and I) as being homework. It was awesome. What was also awesome was being able to get some sort of "algorithm" or at least feed to show it to others, that being my fellow classmates. Getting to interact and comment on their posts and also to have them comment on mine (albeit at a different location that regular viewers of my blog won't see) was very unifying and especially gave our school a sense of togetherness and unity (no, not the catchy song!) that many really needed during this quarantine stuff. So I applaud and thank my English teacher for thinking of something like this as an assignment, and now I will gladly sign off and move on with my day.

To address my regular viewers: Does this mean no more daily posts? Yup, most probably. That doesn't mean I wont try to do almost every day during the summer as usual, but despite proving that I could fit blogging into my schedule if I made the effort, and it being my favorite "productive" virtual hobby, I don't always feel like blogging. Let's face it, even the best athlete will have days where they don't want to play their sport. It's tiring. It takes effort, and time. You don't always have a topic to write about at a given moment. However, I think that the positive effects of this are that it showed me how nice it was to blog more frequently over the school year, so I might try to blog once a week from now on, like over the weekends. During the quarantine, this  might be more often like three times or something like that (again, if I feel like it).

What did you guys think of this daily blog thing? If you did this project, did you enjoy it? Will you keep blogging ever again? As for my viewers, did you like being drowned in new posts every single day? I think going out of it, personally, I'll learn to make my posts a lot shorter and brief, and cut unneeded stuff out as much as possible. So, on that note, this is Arca, signing off. This has been wonderful, everyone. Stay healthy, wash your hands, may the Force be with you, and oh yeah... Be careful about what you read on the Internet tomorrow. Actually, forget I ever said that. See you later, nerds.