Do you know the saying about little acorns growing into big trees? Well that’s what happened here.
It started with an award
Alyson Sheldrake invented the ABC blogging award, which stands for Awesome Blog Content. For people to accept the award, they had to come up with a simple A to Z of words or phrases that meant something to them and publish that list in their acceptance post, with no need for explanations.
Then a personal A to Z of Portugal
Alyson was kind enough to award me, Julie Dawn Fox, the ABC award and doing my A to Z inspired me to go a step further. I blog about living and travelling in Portugal so I began writing an A to Z of Portugal a single post with paragraphs for each letter. I found I had a lot to say about some topics, enough for a separate post, and that’s when I hit on the idea of turning it into a series of posts.
Going global
I thought I’d better explain what I was doing so I wrote an introductory post about my Personal A to Z of Portugal to go with the first post in the series, A is for Alva, the River Alva. As soon as I published it, fellow Portugal bloggers wanted to join in. Within a matter of hours (!) other bloggers around the world had shown an interest in writing their own Personal A to Z of other countries and ‘My Personal A to Z’ went global!
Spreading the fun to everyone
But why stop there? There’s been so much excitement and enthusiasm for this project already that I’ve decided to throw it open to all bloggers, no matter what you write about.
Links, lovely links
As soon as other bloggers took up the challenge, it became clear that we needed a system for collating and sharing links. Alyson set up a page on her blog to do this and began making badges for the A to Zs but now that the doors are wide open to all bloggers and topics, we decided it would be easier for everyone to set up this website.
This way, you know where to come to upload your links and excerpts of your posts and you’ll be able to find other bloggers to set up blog hops with as you work through the challenge.
I’m really excited to see how this challenge will spread, and to reading some amazing posts about what you care about.
Ready to join in with a personal A to Z of your own? Then register your A to Z Challenge. If you want to know more before you start, visit our FAQs page.