The 2023 Blog Project: We Did It!
Last updated: Tuesday July 18th, 2023
Report this blog
When you read the title of this blog, many of you must have wondered "What on earth is this 2023 Blog Project?" Indeed, apart from a dozen or so participants, our work has remained more or less secret until now. If we're revealing its existence today, it's because after months of hard work from several bloggers, we had the pleasure, on 28th June, of achieving our main objective, which will be presented to you next. Just under six months for a project initially planned to take a year... What a great achievement! We hope that after reading these few paragraphs, you will be as enthusiastic as we are, and perhaps even consider joining us in our future projects.
The Project
It all started at the end of 2022, when I was preparing my blog Top Blogs by Language - 2022, to relax after two days of intense work on the year-in-review blog of the French-speaking section. This blog, which went relatively unnoticed at the time of its publication, made me realise just how neglected the foreign blog sections were. For example, in 2022, only 24 blogs were published in all the "foreign" sections of the site... including 22 on the French-language section. Such a situation was nothing less than a waste, given the immense potential of each of these sections. Of course I wanted to change it, but I couldn't see how I could solve this major problem on my own. Under my blog, I was pleasantly surprised to find that other well-known bloggers shared my observation and were equally saddened by it.
With this in mind, I decided at the end of January to contact MG directly under one of his quizzes and tell him about my project: to see at least one blog published in each of the blogs sections of the site during 2023. He was enthusiastic, and it was from this discussion that, a few days later, the Discord server dedicated to the JetPunk blog community was born - or should I say reborn, but that's another story. This will be presented below in this same blog post, but I'd like to make it clear that while it was of course designed to host the bloggers of our favourite site, its creation was also really based around this project for the foreign sections. Plus, its members were originally chosen to achieve the objective, so from among the most influential and active bloggers on the site, but also from non-English-speaking circles, to have a hand in as many sections as possible for the purposes of the project. It wasn't all plain sailing, but coordinating the project via the server was extremely useful and efficient. Organising the project directly on JetPunk would probably have been much more complex, and I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have finished it so soon.
Of course, some languages were easier to learn than others. As in previous years, French showed respectable progress from the begining of the year. Similarly, thanks to Pandryf's impressive involvement, the Polish section honoured its title of second foreign section on the site. Also, thanks to the efforts of cathlete, who managed to involve a large part of our community in the development of the Spanish-speaking section, the figures for Castilian were quite simply prodigious. The Other section deserves a closer look. Over the last few months, the number of languages represented in this section has quadrupled. What's more, with the Telugu community playing an active and important role in the development of this project, this language, which has been the talk of our favourite site since the start of the year, has particularly stood out. As for the rest, it wasn't so easy, but we did get some very useful help from outside. For example, RPHXX agreed to publish a very pleasant blog for the German-speaking section. Pullasorsa, famous for his excellent JetPunk Iceberg among many other great blogs, also joined the project, making things much easier for the Finnish section. As planned, MG took over Portuguese, and at TNT's suggestion, dianalove was invited to join the project and write some of the most interesting blogs the site has ever seen for the Italian section.
It was 4th May. If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that only one section was missing: the Dutch one. We knew from the begining of the project that this would be one of the most difficult sections, so we contacted Nilles on 31st March to see if he would be interested in helping us with the project. He agreed. But with the project coming to fruition faster than expected, it became clear that we couldn't wait until December to get that final blog. In parallel with this major project, you must know that "mini-projects" were set up. One of these, launched on 17th June and still ongoing at the time of writing this blog post, consisted of translating the Quizmaster's Tree Planting Partner blog into all the featured languages of the site, and adding them, with Stewart's help, to the respective front pages of the sections concerned. This started with French, followed by Spanish and Portuguese on the 17th, Polish on the 19th, Finnish on the 25th, and finally... Dutch on the 28th! To everyone's surprise, Simon decided to translate it. I agree that this is not the ideal blog for achieving the objective of this section, but it was more than enough for us. Thank you Simon!
That's how we ended our 2023 Blog Project, which was less ambitious than we had hoped, the objective being achieved before the half of the year. We are very proud of what we have achieved, but we are not going to stop there: the development of the "foreign" sections has only just begun!
The Server
The Resurrected JetPunk Blogging Server, or the Blog Server as we all call it, is the secret hideout of this new blogging community, or it was secret until now. As you might've realized, this is the true grand opening of the server for all bloggers, but we'll get to that soon enough.
The server was founded by Poirot and MG, as owner and moderator respectively, in February 2023, a great era for JetPunk servers. And while the basic purpose of the server is clear, a server for JetPunk bloggers for discussion about anything about blogging, the server also had a great and fitting start by announcing the project soon after its debut. The server started small with only the few necessary channels and a few bloggers, mainly people from various other linguistics communities, enthusiastic about continuing or starting to blog in their mother tongues. But the server continued to grow gradually. More members joined once in a while, and the activity increased, with many long conversations happening just on the server. A community formed, uniting members from all around the world, to come together and grow our blog sections together. On top of that, the server unofficially became a sort of meeting place for issues related to multiple linguistic servers, since it has dedicated representatives from most of them. Many discussions and polls are about comparing the cultures and languages of all our JetPunk communities, as many members focus on their own sections. With topics like these to keep us occupied, the server is often very active, but is still a quiet place. But nothing blog-related is off limits for the server.
Any blogs can be shared on the server, something that will get more fun and useful as the server has its next major growth. If you're new to blogging, we welcome you as well, and you might find the help channel and references helpful. Another important channel is that of foreign language development, which is of course what our previous project was about. In this channel we can coordinate blogs in every section, and the community encouragement from fellow members massively helped me and others promote our sections. There is also a suggestions channel, to give ideas for the blog section, some of which we could even put into effect with our efforts, considering how we've succeeded together with such a large project already.
The Future
By cathlete
As baptiste said, the development of the "foreign" sections has only just begun!
Now that the grand project has reached its completion, what is next? Surely the blogging will not simply end! As of right now, there is no precise goal or project in mind for the various non-English blogging sections, but we certainly know that we all will keep blogging and of course encourage others to join in with the vibrant blogging communities that this project has come to produce.
I know that personally, many of us would love to see a continued increase in publications of solid non-English blogs. I think a natural next step for our blogging community, besides continuing to nourish the various blog sections, is to grow. It would be great for the various blog sections to witness more diversity in bloggers. For instance, the only Italian blogs this year have been by our dear dianalove. And despite having the third most published blogs this (and at times the most number of blogs, even ahead of the vibrant French section), the Polish section experienced a period of almost four months where Pandryf was the only one blogging in Polish. And of course with a more diverse blogging community comes more diverse blogs!
And so we invite you all to join our server! You are the ones who can help us diversify the blogging community. If you aren't a native English speaker, we strongly encourage you to write a blog in your native tongue. Or if you're learning a new language, writing a blog could be a great way to practice! If you don't feel comfortable enough to blog in a different language, being a part of the blogging community by reading blogs and engaging in discussion of blogs in comment sections or our server is certainly also welcome.
So now that the 2023 Blog Project is finished, we encourage a continued growth of all blogging sections, asking for you to join us. There's currently no telling whether future projects will arise, but if I had to take a guess, I'm sure our blogging community isn't done here.
Messages from participants
Several participants in this project wanted to share with you their feelings and experiences during these few months of developing foreign sections. Here are their (more or less) short messages.
N.B.: Messages are simply listed in the alphabetical order of their authors.
Given the awesome results we got, I feel pretty proud to have launched this project. It has been a great pleasure for me to continue encouraging French users to publish blogs, and cathlete very kind in motivating me to publish a few Spanish blogs. I have also loved reading the blogs published by the other contributors, especially Pulla and Diana. In general, the progress made over the few past months is both a pride and a pleasure. I hope that this great project is just the beginning of a long adventure of the blogging community, full of many excellent blogs published in all the JetPunk languages. May the force be with us!
I remember when Poirot/baptiste first reached out to me about this project, and I was 100% in. He had already motivated me to awaken the Spanish blog section a month before with his review on Non-English blogs. Without the help of this project I'm certain the Spanish section would not have had so many different users publish Spanish blogs this year!
The blogging server helps JetPunk create a colourful community where users can explore a different bunch of subjects and share their country's culture and things that they're interested in.
I've seen how the pandemic has impacted on people and how they've started joining JetPunk as an educational leisure. I remember writing something in 2020/2021, but I wasn't that much satisfied of those blogs so I decided to remove them.
Blogs are magnificent and some people do a fantastic job with an incredible amount of resources. Thanks to this server, people learn in a funny way and meet great human beings and bloggers. We all have different lives, but we live in the same world. I feel more connected with this server than with a lot of people in my daily life. It's beautiful to see our shades of personality connect, as introverted or extroverted we may be, because we're united by the passion for this site. I think loads of people, like me, improved not only their knowledge, but also their social skills because of this server.
I don't know how much I'll contribute in the future. I say this a lot, but I prefer being sincere than promising without realising.
Thanks for this opportunity.
Sending virtual hugs for the support, dianalove.
I am still new to blogging, and in this blog there are some other legends have been on this site for years. I’ve been looking forward to blogging since I joined and will say that it’s only increased my love of JetPunk as I was opened to another corner of the site. I feel that for this blogging project, I contributed to the Telugu and Spanish sections the most. I encourage all of you to read a blog in a foreign language. When you get over a small language barrier, you are opened to another 9 language of blogs, no matter how gek those blogs may be.
I’m Pullasorsa and I contributed to the Finnish section. I was approached by Poirot who asked me whether I’d be willing to write a blog in Finnish. Though first hesitant, I thought about the suggestion and came up with a good idea. The blog turned out pretty great and it’s neat to have taken part in this project.
Well, this year seems to be one of the best in terms of blogging, for my part, I have written only one blog but I would still like to tell a little about my experience. At the time of creating my blog on the Pi number I found the blog creation tab to be quite practical, I could easily create what I wanted and I was satisfied with the result. Also, creating a blog helped me to dig a bit more into the Jetpunk community and see how many people like me enjoy geography (or other stuff) and making their own creations. Definitely a rewarding experience.
Making my first blog was probably the biggest change in my JetPunk career, I was not interacting with the community at all earlier, but after starting that I had the opportunity to interact with many bloggers and become part of some communities. I always liked contributing to the blogging community, which I think existed in 2021 though unofficially, with people taking part in projects like DOTJE and Blog Games, but gradually this community fell apart, with members of it becoming inactive or not into blogs anymore. I tried to make more blogs but nothing really happened. Then 2023 came around, and my focus had shifted to JetPunk languages, particularly developing the Telugu community and eventually Telugu section. But one thing that I also hoped for, although I didn't think of it much, was the development of various sections. Like Poirot, I was also excited to see some discussion about this on his end of the year blog, so when he actually contacted me for the project, I was ready to participate, and with the server, an active blog community I could be part of again existed, especially appropriate for my goals on JetPunk right now, so I'm very happy about that. Enough life story, I will get to the project now. I couldn't directly contribute to the project, as the other sections requirements were done by Poirot, but it was still exciting to get to contribute to the other section in Telugu and see the progress on the graph. This was a major place for some of us in the Telugu community to work on developing our section with blogs, and working on this with others from different sections definitely helped. I think this project was a very inspiring one for the foreign languages' blogging communities, as working together to this goal is the greatest motivation we could've had for such an important idea, in my opinion. Thank you to everyone else in this project for making it such a nice experience, and long live the JetPunk Blogging Community!
That's all for us. We hope you have enjoyed reading about our project, and that you'll decide to join us in our adventure, who knows?
Before concluding, we would just like to make it clear that although our server is now open to everyone, it's first and foremost dedicated to the development of the various blog sections. Any trolls or people who don't care about the blogging community will be expelled, so that this server doesn't lose sight of its objectives.
We would also like to thank everyone who, whether they knew it or not, published a blog this year on one of the "foreign" sections of the site, and so helped us achieve our goal. It's thanks to you that these sections will get the attention they deserve. Huge thanks!
Hoping you have enjoyed reading this and our project, and that you too will take part if you wish,
Proudly and sincerely,
The Blogging Community
Also, I’m glad to be the first, and the last moderator of the Blog Server ;)
i will be the last, confirmed by poirotIt’s been a great journey, with more to come
Let's see what the future holds...
Thank you very much for your life-saving and unecpected participation!
By the way, thank you very much for your help and your excellent blog! You have been very important for our project.
I applaud your commitment to improving the various language blog sections, you've done a great job.
.
In that vein, may I extend an offer. If anyone wants to translate any of my blogs into whatever language, you have my permission to do so.
Maybe, "Five Islands of Spain" into Spanish ?
Your offer is very interesting, and I hope that some bloggers will be interested in that.
I have an offer in return for you: if you wanna try to translate some of your blogs in French ("Five Islands of France", for example)with yoru conversationnal French level, then I would check and if needed correct them for you with pleasure. ;-)
P.S. Pretty cool we got a discord server for blogs out of it too. Might check it out sometime :)
We will probably organize some projects for the English section as well, so feel free to have a look!
He's curious, he's investigating. Maybe he wants to join. Everything is fish-friendly here.
Join us, my dear Jeppy! We would love that.
Thank you very much for your positive thoughts and your implication!
I think maybe I can also contribute to your idea and write some blog in my native language?
In any case, what you are doing is amazing and the development of other languages will only benefit JetPunk
It would be awesome to develop the Russian blog section, we would love to get your help! Thank you for the proposition.
Everyone has their tastes, after all. However, since blogs' perception is highly subjective, it would have been kind for the community if you had argued your opinions.
Last months, I had a lot of things to do, because of this I start so late with the translation.
But in a few days, it´s finished :)
It will be the 4th version of this blog, that's awesome!
Please read the blurb of the blog that I shared with you and see what can you do!
I tried but it seems that it's impossible to add charts to a collabed blog. However, you could copy the data from my chart (clik on its link and then on "Show Chart Data" below the chart) and import it on your own chart editor to create a German version of the chart with my data. A screenshot is good too, that's how you prefer.