A Blaugust Introduction (Day 1)

Date: August 1st, 2026

Welcome to Aster’s Asterisms!

Today is August 1st, which can only mean one thing: it’s Blaugust! For those of you unaware, Blaugust is an annual blogging challenge that asks participants to create 31 blog posts, one for each day of August. Although awards are still given out for smaller milestones (5, 15, and 25 posts), I want to try and reach the 31 post goal. This, of course, will be easier said than done, as August this year is going to be insanely busy (flying back to the United States, creating 16 lesson plans and PowerPoints, the start of classes, etc. etc.), so I’ll be happy to get the Bronze Award.

Furthermore, this year there are Community Builder awards, which are defined as follows (from Nerd Girl Thoughts):

Community builders will meet at least three of the following challenges:

• Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form.
• Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question.
• Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week.  Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media.
• Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours!
• Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day.

I hope to try to all five of them, but we will see how that goes :) If you’d like to join, use the signup form!

Introduction

For those of you new to Aster’s Asterisms (which should be all of you, for this is the first blog post of this website!), welcome! I am Aster (they/them), a college student from Indiana, USA. This is actually not my first year of Blaugust; I did it last year under the domain leveret.study (which I no longer have) but only got to like… two posts. So I hope to have a bit more of an impact this year.

Aster’s Asterisms started three years ago with asters-asterisms.neocities.org, where I took heavy inspiration form image mapping styles, popularized by ribo.zone. It went through extensive design reforms over the years, all stemming from my consistent pendulum swinging between minimalist design and maximalist design. This put me in a bit of a rut where I felt like I was making no progress, since I was just constantly restarting.

I’m safe to say that I believe those times are behind us, because I finally did what I should have a long time ago: separate my sites. Aster’s Asterisms, now on the asteriisms.com domain, is my blog with slash pages, aiming to be more community focused. My other three (!!) domains are as follows (note that they either have nothing on them or are a mishmash of pages):

• Leveret Star is for satisfying my maximalist tendencies and a way for me to really test the limits of CSS and JavaScript. I hope to make digital shrines for all my various interests with incorporating a story line.
• Maumee Genealogy is for my genealogical research.
• Eight Mountains is for my research on Chinese Buddhism, with the goal of educating on topics related to that topic.

For those that are wondering, I bought my domains with Porkbun and they are hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.

Blog’s theme

The overarching theme of this blog is that there is no theme. I’ll probably mainly talk about my interests (genealogy, religious studies, webweaving, tennis, etc. etc.) but it’ll just be anything that comes to my mind. I hope to see you guys in the next update!