A-Z Challenge 2024: Reflections

 I stumbled across the idea of the At to ZChallenge for bloggers quite by chance and straight away thought it a good idea for giving information about my One Place Study of Cuckfield.  I only discovered to challenge at the beginning of March so I had to get my head down and do some research quickly, having a list of letters and potential topics to hand.

Cuckfield Compendium website was created in the late 1990's/early 2000's but was only registered as a One Place Study in 2023.  This blog was only created in 2023 to accompany the website and to help increase it's media presence.  

Each day I tried to create 2 pages and have them ready to automatically post on the right day on my blog.  Obviously I found more information a few days later and by being ahead of the game I could still amend or add to already prepared blog posts.  Some days, of course, I didn't have a chance to even create one post but they were all there and ready to go with a couple of days to go before the actual challenge started.

I learned a lot of information and useful links whilst I did the research and so consequently have yet another bookmark on my toolbar so I can easily go back to them.

I had to think about where I could widen my link to the public because my blog, being fairly new, doesn't have much footfall at the moment.  I really wanted to get it out there so that it would be seen and people researching Cuckfield for whatever reason would find it and be led to my big website on Cuckfield.  In the end I used the obvious choice of posting to my Facebook profile and also in a local group for Cuckfield. I also posted in the four main "tweeting" apps:  X (formerly known as Twitter), Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon.

It has been interesting to monitor the statistics for the encouraging number of hits (295) the blog has had during April and the winner hands down was Facebook with Twitter not far behind.  I have also had an increased footfall on my website.  I hope you have enjoyed the journey if you have been a follower.

Now I have 26 days worth of topics to add to my website either on pages that are already have some content on the subject or else create some draft pages ready for more information and then upload them.  It might be a busy time.

• This was the start of the journey.
• You can view my website here.
• You can see what the Society of One Place Studies is all about here.

I have created an A to Z spreadsheet with different topics and as I have read other blogs during this challenge I have been able to add other possibilities to the list of topics per letter.

To end.....would I do it again?  Yes I would but maybe not on Cuckfield this time.  I could do it on my own genealogy blog or maybe on a new blog for yet another One Place Study if I get it up and running in time.