Zero to Hero Challenge

So WordPress is hosting this challenge to get people to think more deeply about their blogs, to experiment and have fun with the blogging process.  This blog is sort of my red-headed stepchild, the last one I think to update, so I’m going to participate in the challenge and drink all the inspiration from it that I can.

I joined the program in process yesterday.  The challenge for Day 1 was to Introduce Yourself by writing a “who I am and why I’m here” post.  That led to my manifesto yesterday.

I went ahead and did Day 2: What’s Your Name? as well.  Bloggers were encouraged to polish up the titles of their blogs or their taglines, but I’m happy with mine.  Both of them sum up what I want to do here pretty well.  We were also supposed to write text for an about the blog widget, but I wasn’t sure I needed one.  I mean, I’ve got the About.me widget and the Facebook widget and my About Me page and all the pages focusing on my work.  How much can I really expect anyone to read?  So I made a blurb from the especially nice quote Tom Roche wrote about me and called it good.

Day 3′s challenge was to write the post that you had in mind when you started the blog.  I’ve struggled with finding a topic since yesterday, without any luck.  I’m going to have to come back to that one.

The challenge for Day 4 was to Explore the Neighborhood by finding five new blogs to follow.  I already follow 80+ blogs and can barely keep up, so I’m looking to whittle down my list instead of add to it.  However, I did search for blogs tagged “cemetery” on WordPress and left a ton of comments.  Maybe that’s close enough to the spirit of the challenge.

For Day 5, we were encouraged to try out a bunch of new themes.  I went through hours of theme exploration when I set this blog up a year ago and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got.  I wanted the theme to echo the design of Cemetery Travel, allow me to customize the photo in the header, and give me the sidebar and footers to add widgets to.  For now I’m going to stand pat with the theme I’ve got.

Day 6′s challenge was to do something you’d never done before on your blog: add a video or a gif or embed tweets or tracks from Spotify.  I’ll do that one tomorrow.

Are you doing the Zero to Hero challenge? How’s it going for you?

If you’re interested in joining up now, you can click on the image above and be taken to the challenge’s home.