Blog Summary

Reviewing my blog projects over the past few years has made me realise just what an impact blogging has had on my life.

If asked I would have said that my two major interests were wargaming and hill walking, in that order.   However I now realise that blogging is a third major interest, and possibly should be the first in order of priority.

At present I have three blog projects.

Napoleonic Wargaming is still my major one, though it takes up less actual time.   I post once a week, and it normally does what the label says.  It covers all aspects of my interest in the subject.  

1813 Campaign is a diary of my ongoing wargame campaign.  I post at least once a week, but often more than once.

Jan and Paul in Spain is a record of our hill walking.   We run two U3A day walks each week, one on Monday and one on Thursday.   This has become by far the most time consuming of the three blogs.

I had not really appreciated how much blogging has influenced my two hobbies of wargaming and hill walking.

The whole campaign has been organised to make it suitable for posting on the blog. The maps have been constantly upgraded to show the detail required for the blog.   The whole administration of the campaign has been adapted to record on the blog.   Each wargame move is photographed for the blog battle report.  

But it is our hill walking which has been most influenced by the blog.   I started by taking a couple of photographs on each walk, and posted them in the blog with a written description of the walk.  However I was soon taking twenty or thirty photographs of each walk, so that I would have twenty suitable ones for each blog. The summery was reduced to a  line below each photograph.  I now take about fifty photographs of each walk, and other members of the group regularly send me photographs they have taken for inclusion on the blog.

Each walk takes five to six hours, so Monday and Thursday are devoted to the actual walking.   Tuesday and Saturday are devoted to preparing the blog, the video and the next walk.   All photographs taken have to be weeded and tidied up.   The video is done first and then the blog.   The photographs are accompanied by a short summary of the walk.   The blog also includes a link to the video.   When both are completed I prepare the email of the following week’s walk.

Little by little, and almost unnoticed by me, blogging has taken over a considerable part of each week.   It has also imposed a discipline on both my wargaming activities and my twice weekly walks.

In the summer months, when it is too hot to walk, the weekly Napoleonic Wargaming and 1813 Campaign blogs expand to cover my spare time.   That is why I started work on making videos of my wargaming and walking blogs during the long summer.   When we started walking again in October both suffered in favour of the twice weekly walking blog.

In retrospect perhaps the subject of this blog should be Blog Obsession rather than Blog Summary?