What's up with these #atozchallenge Category Codes?

Happy A-Z Theme Reveal Day! Stop on by to see the list of folks who are participating!

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In the 2013 Challenge, we introduced a new feature to the sign-up process called Category Codes. These are codes which allow you to identify the general topics of your blog, to give other participants a bit more information about what they might see on your blog, before they click your link. In case you missed it, here are the instructions and the list of Codes from the sign-up page: 

There are categories for those looking for like-minded blogs. Select ONE category code and enter it after your blog’s title/name. The code applies to your blog, not your theme for the Challenge and is purely optional. However, if your blog has adult content, you MUST mark it (AC) or it will be removed from the list. Codes are as follows: 

1. WRITING: (WR) 
2. BOOKS: (BO) 
3. FILM: (FM) 
4. PHOTOGRAPHY: (PH) 
5. GARDENING: (GR) 
6. CRAFT: (CR) 
7. ART: (AR) 
8. MUSIC: (MU)   
9. CULINARY: (CU) 
10. LIFESTYLE: (LI ) 
11. FASHION: (FA) 

12. PERSONAL: (PR) 

13. SOCIAL MEDIA: (SO) 

14. GAMING: (GA) 

15. EDUCATION: (ED) 

16. POLITICS: (PO) 

17. HISTORY: (HI) 

18. SCIENCE: (SC) 

19. HUMOR: (HU) 

20. TRAVEL: (TR) 

21. MISCELLANEOUS: (MI) 

22. ADULT CONTENT: (AC) 

The A-Z Team thinks these codes are really awesome, and encourages everyone to use them. Here are a few reasons it's beneficial to use the Category Codes:

• Interested in a certain topic? Look for folks with the appropriate Category Code marking and go visit their blog!
• Hoping to attract others to your blog that are interested in the same topics as you are? Commenting on others' blogs is the best way to drive traffic to your own, so if say, you write about Education and want other educators to find you - go visit them first! Remember, A-Z is all about making connections so use the Codes to help you find your people.
• Is there something that you aren't really interested in? You might skip blogs that are marked with that Code. But! The Challenge can also be a great opportunity to push your boundaries. In our humble opinion, our participants are the best of the 'net, so the Challenge might be the place where you find a really excellent blogger that shows you that a certain topic isn't so bad, after all.

As we are just over a week out from the start of the Challenge, and the sign-ups are just rolling in, we hope that new participants will stake their claim in a category, and hope that folks who are already browsing the list will start to take advantage of the Codes to find their future blogging besties!

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A note on Adult Content blogs - this is the only category for which we have made it mandatory to identify yourself. Many of our participants have families and jobs, and we don't want to risk disruption of harmony in either of those locations if someone were to accidentally end up with explicit material up on their computer. And so we require that AC blogs identify themselves, out of respect for other participants. Any unidentified AC blog that is discovered by the Host Team will be immediately removed from the list. For more information, check out this post from a couple weeks ago. Thanks for your cooperation on this!

How to Be One Step Ahead for #atozchallenge

Hello Alphabet Fans,
I have a quick idea I thought I'd share to make life easier come April. Unlike most of the co-hosts, I haven't written and pre-scheduled all of my posts.  I do have a theme, and I do know what I'm doing for each letter, but that's as far as I've gotten.

Maybe that's where you are, too, or maybe you don't have a theme and are just going to go day by day. That's totally cool, too.  Here's how to make it just a bit quicker each day.

Between now and April 1, go put up a draft of each post.  Here are the steps.

1) Download all of Jeremy's amazingly beautiful letters.  I like to start each post with the letter of the day so that visitors know right away that I'm participating, and on the right letter.  They are under the "banner/badges" tab up at the top.  They look like this.

Pretty, eh?

2) Now go to start to write a post in the compose window.  Insert the correct letter.  Put the letter A as your title, or the real title, if you've picked it out.

3) Pre- schedule the post.  Not sure how to pre-schedule?  I wrote a post about it here.

4) Not sure what day to put each letter on?  Under banners/badges there's a desk top calendar you can use, or in the FAQ, there's a simple list of what letter goes with each day.

5) Be sure to save your post.  It will show up in your post list as a draft.  

6) When you've written the post, even if it's days ahead, be sure to push publish.  It will sit and wait until the proper day and time and then magically, you'll wake up and see your post already up, and with comments!  Because you have turned off the evil CAPTCHA, right?

If it's still on, and you should check your settings under comments to make sure, we have a video in the FAQ about how to disable it.  DO IT NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T.

I hope these tips are helpful.  If you have any questions, we are all ready to answer them.  

infoatoz2014@gmail.com

Be patient though, AJ and I are pretty busy, so it might take a few days.  If you're in a hurry for the answer, you can email me, Tina, directly.  My email is in the contact tab.

~Tina, A to Z Team

P.S Do you see how useful those tabs are?  If you haven't read them, please do so.  The info we've put there for you will help you have a great A-Z Challenge!

#atozchallenge -- Stormy the Weather Gnome talks mid-alphabet slump!

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If this is your first year doing the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, or your fifth, it's easy to get bogged down during the middle of the alphabet.

It's not that M, N, O, and P are boring, it's just that you've been looking at letters for about two weeks and there seems no end in sight!

Well, don't bury your head like an ostrich! 

You must embrace the middle!

You must find your inner motivation!

You must push through those 'sucking you down like quicksand' and 'walking through molasses' letters!


Have a laugh!
 

Have another!

And then, get right back to work!

The end is near!!!!

Getting to Know Your Co-Hosts for #atozchallenge: Tina @ Life is Good

Hi, I'm Tina, the super-shy one on the team.  Ahem.  SO not true.  If you've ever read my blog, Life is Good, you know I'm pretty much an open book.  I have no on-line persona.  I'll talk about anything (and have).  I write embarrassing stories about myself.  I talk about my family, my life, my struggles, fears, hopes and dreams.  

I know some think that doing so is dangerous, that I'm opening myself up for stalking, identity theft.  Kidnapped children.   Have at it people.  You can come take my medical bills, my asthma, my messy house, my struggles with contentment.  You can come finish all the still-in-progress projects at my house.  You won't find much of material value here, and my life is eternal, so if you take my earthly one, well then, it was my time.  I have a strong faith, and though I'm a very bossy, take charge, schedule oriented "let's get this done" type of person, I have no illusions that I have control of my life.  God's in charge.  

I do like the questions, so here you go:

How far in advance do you prepare your theme and complete your A-Z before the Challenge begins? (Yvonne)

Um, I usually don't.  I try to get the first three or so set up, and if I know I'll be out of town, then I'll write the posts for those days.  There are several reasons for this.  One: I'm so stinking busy from January to April with behind the scenes stuff of a co-host, that I don't have the time.  Two: I really like the spontaneity of daily writing, the pressure, the deadline. I know that sounds crazy, but it's totally doable if you have your theme and topics for each letter picked out. So yeah, none of mine are done yet...but I picked my theme in January and have been working on matching the letters and the topics since then.

At the end of a long day…wine? beer?? Walk?? Chocolate?? Pet your pet?? Sex?? (SammyD)

SammyD and I have been getting to know each other.  It started with the info@ email and went from there...so I will not shy away from a question with the word sex in it.  This does not make this question (AC) so feel free to keep reading.

I love wine and beer, I can't walk very far right now because of my severe asthma but it's getting better.  Can't eat chocolate because I'm hypoglycemic.  Can't have pets because of the asthma.  Sex is one of the best stress relievers I know, so at the end of the day, you'll find me with a glass of chardonnay in my hand, and a gleam in my eye ;-)

Do you believe in Sasquatch? (JoJo)

Absolutely.  I also believe we still have some aquatic dinosaurs.  My husband, The Engineer, and my dad, The Swede, and I were on a sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay.  We each individually saw the head of a plesiosaurus come up and say hi, about a 100 yards away. The Engineer saw it first and asked my dad what it was.  We watched some more.  It came up again. We looked at each other in awe.  We thought maybe we'd had too much sun, but we kept watching and theorizing, and in the end, it was the only conclusion which made sense.  Then The Engineer and I watched a NOVA about dinosaurs and saw what they looked like and it was exactly what we saw.  NOVA said they're still out there.

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I blog at Life is Good, and have had two short stories published.  I'm a columnist for a newsletter, and have been writing my first novel for too long. I'm also the mom of two teenage boys and the wife of a nutty-professor inventor-engineer so life is never dull, nor does it have much free time.  But life IS good.

Meet Your Co-Hosts - A Word (or Two) about Nicole #atozchallenge

I am Nicole Ayers and this will be my fourth year doing the Blogging from A-to-Z Challenge at The Madlab Post as well as my second year in a Co-Host position. 

In addition to hosting the Monday Movie Meme – a weekly blog event challenging you to pick films you've seen that fit various themes, I pimp out my short film "ABYSS: The Greatest Proposal Ever" in hopes of finding my place in the world. You can connect with me on Twitter, Watch videos on my YouTube channel and Follow my boards on Pinterest – but many of you all knew that already, so let’s get down to business where I tell you what you probably didn't know about me.

• I favor action and adventure movies among most all other genres. If I’m going to the theater, something has to start exploding within the first half or somebody (preferably Bruce Willis or Matt Damon) better be jumping off of moving vehicles on the highway. Otherwise, I tend to lose interest quickly.

• Right now, my Top 5 movies (in no particular order) are:

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

The Town

Bad Boys II

Schindler’s List

A Beautiful Mind

• My fascination with movies comes from the invention of video cameras. During childhood, I was always fascinated with recording devices -- being able to capture moments and play them back on television or a boom box stereo system. 

An uncle used to bring his huge VHS camcorder to most of my family’s’ events and I was always excited by how he could get everything on tape for us to watch later for amusement or remembrance. I later developed interest in learning how films were made.

• If I was forced to choose between spending the rest of my life without books or without films, I would say goodbye to films. Books would be my best friend forever because they can be enjoyed as-is whereas we need so much more resources to watch films such as hardware & utilities. 

Films require high maintenance, even as a pastime. People don’t need DVD players, iTunes, electricity or data plans and other first-world luxuries to read a book. Plus, it would be silly of me to ignore how much more beneficial reading is compared to watching movies.

• What I like best about co-hosting the A-to-Z Challenge is the chance to give back to Arlee Bird and his event that helped me step my blogging game up, saved me from existential despair and helped me build so many quality friendships.

• My philosophy on life can be described in the following sentence:

Each day is a blessing, so make it count!

• The weirdest thing I've researched is vesicovaginal fistulas, for a freelance writing assignment, which made me even more apprehensive about childbirth.

• The last book I really did not enjoy was The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. I had high hopes for this book but it pissed me off by being so difficult to read that I stopped after only a few pages in.

• If I could describe my short film “Abyss: The Greatest Proposal Ever” in one word, it would be: Propositions

• In a classroom full of creative, sporty and geeky children, the artistic group is where I would fit in. I was a creative kid who could usually be found drawing pictures, painting and writing short stories at any given time. I also played “school” while managing a home library. While sports weren't my thing, I was pretty good at soccer but if I could turn back the hands of time, I’d repeat my cheerleading days in a heartbeat.

• I’m still prepping a theme and am not even at the halfway mark for completing my A-Z posts in advance. Add to that my spontaneous plan to do the challenge with two blogs this year and it’s just one big ol’ pickle of madness that could very well be a recipe for disaster. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking!

• Telling someone my darkest secret would defeat the whole purpose of it being a secret, would it not? I think so.

• Sometimes I blog in one of the student lounges at a local University and other times I blog in the (dis)comfort of my kitchen.

That’s all for now, folks! I would like to thank my Mighty Minion Bureau Assets – Dale at Smurfin’ the Web, Andrea MusicFan at Twelve Steps to Cloud Nine, Melody-Ann Jones-Kauffman at MAJK INK, Deniz Bevan at The Girdle of Melian, Sydney Aaliyah and SA Larsen for helping me come up with material for this “About Me” post for this year’s Blogging from A-to-Z Challenge. 

Also, shouts out to Yvonne, Susan Scott and Rob Tobor for obliging in Tina Downey’s (at Life is Good) request to hit us all with your best questions. Stay tuned for additional nuggets of stuff about me, which I’ll be putting up over at The Madlab Post.