When I entered the contest to win a Zune, I didn’t have my hopes too high of winning. Anytime there is a drawing for a prize and your name is in the hat, you can hope you win and enjoy some suspense until the drawing, but if your name isn’t pulled out of the hat, you have no reason to be disappointed because it is all a matter of chance and luck. So why am I making a post about why I didn’t win a prize when I’m saying there is nothing to be upset about and how can there be a reason I didn’t win if it was all a matter of chance?

First, I’d like to congratulate the winner of the Zune. The winner was an individual referred to only as Enkay. I have looked at his site a little bit, but not enough to form an opinion of it as of yet, but go check it out, I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

Now for the reason I didn’t win. I didn’t win because I didn’t have a chance at winning, my name wasn’t even in the hat. Yes I made the required post about the contest and passed along some link love, but along with the posting of the name of the winner, Ms. Danielle made the following statement “This contest was able to receive a total of 74 official entries. What do I mean by official? Well, there were a couple entries that I didn’t allow because they were newly-created blogs (created the day of or the day before the entry). It’s not fair to all of you bloggers who work consistently on your blogs to lose a contest to someone who’s spent 10 minutes and zero dollars on their blog entering this contest.”

I respect Danielle’s decision to not put my name in the hat because my blog was quite new at the time (I just looked and my contest entry was my third post) and I’m still new (this is only number 28). While I am working on generating content and getting this site to be something worth promoting, I’m sure she was taking action to protect against (scammers) those who would start a blog to enter the contest and not add to it after that. My site does fall in to the category of “day before the entry.”

At the same time, I’m somewhat outraged. I do work on this site a lot, and think about it almost constantly when I’m not working on it and think I deserved to have my name included as much as anyone else. I followed the rules and and made the required entry. The part about 10 minutes and zero dollars kind of rubs me the wrong way as well. I have spent money on this site I am my own hosting provider so I bought a server and also bought the domain name. As far as the “10 minutes”, even before I had the server I spent several hours learning a bit about WordPress, email, and other aspects that I had not dappled in before. Then, after the server arrived I spent many hours getting the operating system installed and settings tweaked to my liking as well as getting the website itself running and tweaked.

At any rate, I didn’t win the Zune because my name was not in the hat, Enkay won the Zune, and I will still continue to visit Ms. Danielle on a regular basis. Next time, my site won’t be so new and my name will be included.

Edit: I was in fact in the hat! Yay me :D I guess Ms. Danielle has an eye for what sites are real and what ones were just around to enter her contest. I apologize if I was too mean to Danielle, but at the same time I don’t think I was, I did mention that I would still continue to visit her site even when I thought I was not included in the contest. This is because I like that she did what she did to protect against the scammers. If nothing else, let this post serve as a “proceed with caution” flag for those who may attempt to implement a similar filter for their future contests, you may not have as good of an eye for what is real and what is just to enter a contest as Danielle does.