Image source: Wikimedia Commons

November is just around the corner, and with it the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. During NaNoWriMo, hundreds of thousands of participants from all over the world embark on a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in the 30 days of November. They support and cheer each other on both online and at local get-togethers.

Now, writing 50,000 words in a month is a bit too ambitious for me 😀 But on the other hand I really like the idea of a community of people encouraging each other to get more writing done within a set timeframe.

Therefore, I would like to propose a community BloPoWriMo (short for Blog Post Writing Month). The goal is straightforward: If you’d like to take part, write and publish a blog post about a topic of your choice on the SAP Community site during the month of November.

If you are a blogging newbie, BloPoWriMo is an opportunity for you to dive in and get your first post out in the world. And if you are already a seasoned blogger, BloPoWriMo is your chance to finally write up that great idea for a post, you just haven’t gotten around to working on yet.

Personally, I want to write the second installment of the XSLT blog post series I started some 20 months ago… In my defense, I did warn that posts would probably be published at very irregular intervals 😉

When you publish your blog post, make sure to give it the user tag BloPoWriMo2021. I will then update this post with a link and an introduction to your work.

Happy writing everybody – let’s do this together! If you have any questions or thoughts, if you are looking for feedback or if you would like to bounce ideas for topics around, let’s meet up in the comments below.

BloPoWriMo 2021 posts

Matthias Wild writes about the new Administration and Management Console of the SAP ASE database. Matthias also gets the honour of publishing the first BloPoWriMo post in 2021 – congratulations! You’ll find the post here: AMC for SAP ASE – Setup SSL for AMC and Workload Analyzer

Mohammadhadi Shadmehr has blogged about SAP Conversational AI’s FAQ bot. It’s also Mohammadhadi’s first blog post – well done! Check it out here: Simple and Useful FAQ Chatbot: 10 Tips to Get More Out of SAP Conversational AI FAQ Bot Step by Step (Sample Bot is Available)

The third BloPoWriMo post in 2021 is also by Mohammadhadi, who has clearly gotten the blogging bug 🙂 This time, the topic is calling SAP Search APIs from SAP Conversational AI. Here’s the post: Call SAP Search APIs in SAP Conversational AI to Enrich your Fallbacks

Denys van Kempen has written not one but two BloPoWriMo posts. The first one is an FAQ for SAP HANA admins. The second one is a tutorial about SAML SSO for SAP Analytics Cloud.

Bärbel Winkler blogs about transaction code SAT and how it has helped her troubleshoot many a problem. Check out the blog post here: SAT to the rescue!

Bhavinkumar Vyas posted a two-part summary of the TechEd 2021 SAP Analytics track. Here are the links: Part 1 Part 2

Laurens Deprost writes about ranges and select-options in the context of modern ABAP. Here’s the post: Working with select-options and ranges tables in modern ABAP

Yours truly managed to get the second Thinking in XSLT post out in time for BloPoWriMo, yay! You can check it out here: Thinking in XSLT: An introduction to XPath

BloPoWriMo FAQ

How do I get started with blogging?

If you are new to the SAP Community site, let me suggest that you complete the Tour the SAP Community tutorial, which will teach you the basics. When you have finished the tutorial, you will also have the blogger level that you need to write your first blog post on the SAP Community site. Keep in mind that your first two posts will be reviewed by a moderator before they go online. This can take up to 72 business hours.

If you have any questions about getting started, please feel free to post them in the comments below.

What should I write about?

When it comes to choosing a topic, the old adage of “write what you know” makes a lot of sense. Something you are already thinking about, researching, studying or reading about makes for an excellent topic. And if you blog about something you really care about and find fascinating, you’ll have more fun writing, ideas will come to you more naturally and your posts will be more interesting.

Here are a couple of concrete post ideas:

• Write about an event you’ve taken part in (TechEd, for instance, is coming up in November)
• If you answered a question in the Q&A section, a blog post is a great way to expand on it and really get into the details
• Write about a new product feature you’ve discovered and why you think it’s cool
• Write up the answer to a question you get asked a lot by colleagues or clients
• Write about an interesting discovery you’ve made

And if you should ever find yourself thinking “I wish someone would blog about X”, be that heroic someone and start writing a blog post about that topic.

Why should I bother with blogging?

Blogging is a great way to share your knowledge and give back to the community. Also, researching for a blog post is a good way to learn even more about the topic. Blogging can also help build your professional profile. In addition, it’s a lot of fun and very rewarding. And if those reasons don’t convince you, this one will: Blogging earns you badges on your SAP Community profile *drops mic*.