Great Blogging Ideas!

If you haven't noticed I have been really in to blogging lately.  Blogging more regularly was one of my New Year's Resolutions (probably the only one I've stuck with so far, honestly) and I've been having a lot of fun reading new blogs, meeting new people, and having fun interactions with readers.

So I made a new goal and that was to get more organized with what I write about.  I decided that I would make a calendar of topics for the month of April and see if that helps me be more systematic.  As I was looking for ideas, I ran across some really fun websites to pull information from.  I thought I would share them here so that I have them all in the same place and so that others might be able to use them too.

I also set up a Google Calendar titled "Blogging Ideas."  I did that mainly because the first draft of my calendar was with pen and paper and I promptly lost it!  The other fun thing about setting up the calendar is that I can set certain events to recur every year.  That will make my calendar last much longer.

To get started, I wrote down all the personal things that will be happening during the month of April.  I know Benjamin's birthday is coming up, as well as my parent's wedding anniversary.  Easter happens at the end of March, but since I don't typically blog on the weekends, I added that to the beginning of April.

After filling in all the personal events, I still had a lot of blank days left, so I went to one of my favorite websites: Holiday Insights to see what they had to offer. I use this site at work a lot. One of the things I have my students do every month is set up a display on the bookshelves. One display has books from author's who have birthdays during that month. The other display has books about fun and strange celebrations.  My students make posters to go with the displays and I think they have fun with it.

This one just cracked me up!

I picked out some of these holidays that I thought I could write about and added them to my calendar.  These are the type that I set to repeat every year. That way if I end up not using it this year, I can try again next year.

My calendar still wasn't full, so I tried out a few other websites.  History.com has a feature that highlights events from history for each day. It defaults to the current date, but you can use the calendar to pick a different date. I added a few of these that caught my eye to my calendar.

Next I went to Wikipedia.com and typed in a date. Here you can find events, as well as birthdays and death dates of famous people and holidays and observances. You can also click on those events to go to the Wikipedia entry for them if you need some background information.

The last two places might not be for everyone, but I found them useful, so I'll pass them along.  At birthverse.com you can type in a date and get a special bible verse related to that date. For example, my birthday is March 13 (or 3/13), so my birthverse is

1 Thessalonians 3:13 NIV May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

The actual intent of the site is to find the verse that correlates to your birth date, but you can just pick a date and it gives you a nice verse that you can reflect on. 

Being Catholic I thought it might also be fun to look at Catholic.org and search for feast days and holy days. You can find the Saint of the Day, daily readings, and even a prayer of the day that might spark an idea for you to write about.

Of course, all of these ideas will be trumped if something interesting actually happens in my life. I would prefer to have a daily record of things that happen, cute pictures of my kids and/or funny things they say.  Sometimes, though, they just don't deliver and I have to look for back up ideas.  Now I have a whole year's worth in a few clicks!

Where do you get your blogging ideas?