Something I think I’d love to see more from bloggers, whether it be technical/web development, or just things in general about themselves, is publishing what they have in mind for ideas to write about.

For example, I’ve spent a little bit of time today trying to think of some topics I’d like to write about over on my Michaelbox.net web development blog. With that, I decided to also create a page that lists all my ideas at this point, and published it at https://michaelbox.net/writing-topics/. Lastly, I added it to my menu so that it can be more easily discovered.

If you visit that page, you’ll see rough ideas that don’t give away any meat n potatoes of the posts themselves, so there’s no ideas to “steal” outside of the topic itself. Heaven forbid people post and talk about the same things on their own websites, right?

Not sure I’m going to be able to do quite the same for my domain here which is a bit more free form and generalized about myself specifically, or things I consume/do. However, it would be awesome if I could. Then I could probably just keep extrapolating for all my active sites.

That said, I’d love it if others started doing the same thing, sharing what general ideas they are wanting to explore and write about, before they’ve actually drafted, and edited, and polished, and published.

Three to four years back I think, I came up with the idea of “The 25 Days of Scrooge”. Over time I came to realize that my favorite Christmas story is “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. A classic tale to so many, and many would likely agree with me.

Due to its classic-ness, it’s been adapted to plays and movies and TV specials many times over since its first release. Surely there’s at least 25+ variations.

Thus “The 25 Days of Scrooge” was born. The idea being that every day, starting on December 1st, and ending on Christmas day, you watch at least one available version of the story.

I have never fully completed this challenge, because let’s be honest, that’s a LOT to go through and by the time you get to Christmas day, you’d probably be saying “Humbug!” to the idea of watching any more of the story. That said, I do hope to actually achieve this one year.

A year with a pandemic would probably serve as a pretty good chance, however I have also been extremely fortunate to have not had my day job affected, and I don’t always have the best time management skills, so it’d still be a challenge to get a viewing in every day. I would not be watching/listening while doing my job.

More typically, what I’ll do is focus and watch my favorite versions rather than enough to fill 25. Below are much of my favorites, in no specific order except the first one because the Muppets.