To be honest, one of the first things I usually did when I was creating a new Confluence Space was... switching the Blogs OFF. 😳
For a person whose job is 70% writing, this doesn't make much sense, right?
But I had a special view on the built-in blogging function, and it was primarily on the opposing side:
- you can't duplicate pages if you have recurring content
- no way to reorder blogs
- people usually ignore it because it's positioned somewhere below the classic page tree (yeah, I know it's now a content tree, but let me stay nostalgic for a while)
Last October, after years of turning off the built-in blog, I decided to give it a chance. When I worked at Old Street Solutions, I developed a habit of conducting monthly observations of our marketing work, progress, ups, and downs. We were so focused on our goals that we never paid attention to the small wins. Which in turn made not reaching the goal a big hit on our motivation and mental state. That is not cool when you have so many achievements along the way.
In OSS, I used the usual structure of parent-child pages situated in our Marketing projects tree.
At Fun Inc, we already had so many marketing activities running on the Marketing Space that I decided to separate my blogs into Blogs. Atlassians be like "Duh, how many years did it take you to figure it out? 🙄"
This is how the Marketing Monthly Reflections series started. At the end of each month, I compiled a summary of the goods and bads from the month, along with social media, website, and newsletter statistics and their trends. Even in a three-person company, not everyone is supposed to stay on track with everything, and we are all the type of people who wouldn't celebrate a tiny little win.
And shared within a structured piece of content makes it enjoyable and easy to read and reflect on.
How do I feel about Blogs now?
I still miss the copy/duplicate function, especially when my blogs start similarly every time.
- What I found particularly useful this time was the pressure of maintaining a strict schedule for my monthly writings. Once you have passed the month or year, you can't go back and reorder. I missed my December blog and wrote it in January, and guess what, I will be forever triggered about my December 2024 reflection being part of 2025.
- Given the numerous projects in the content section, it was handy to have blogs in a separate section, consistently positioned at the same level.
Have you ever tried Blogs before? If you were like me and disabled or ignored this section, give it a try. It may help your team celebrate something they've never paid attention to.
