Posts about Weblogs (RSS, JSON)

10AM — Lessons from Robert Redford’s impeccable fashion sense. (Side note: I wish Derek Guy would put this kind of content on his blog instead of Bluesky, which I have blocked on my devices along with other social media platforms to stay sane. And the way the thread is presented here, interrupted by irrelevant comments by his followers, just doesn’t make for a good reading experience.

10AM — Can Directories Rise Again?. I sure hope so, but I don’t think many people will put in the work to dig through directories as long as they can access no-effort curated content 24/7.

The only resistance to the current advance of AI is humanity. We are relearning that humans can see through the bullshit. There are examples everywhere.

This is why I love blogs with many links as they are chronologically ordered lists of links curated by humans. I trust humans more when they are posting for the sake of collecting content, instead of posting for reach, and likes and comments and going viral. Because such people don’t see through the bullshit, they contribute to it.

12PM — Kottke redesigns. I like the new vibe, two columns, dense typography—it gives quite the 2007-blog-days feeling. I’m not sure about “social media energy than blog energy”. The preview cards that we’ve known since eons from our favourite social-media sites add clutter to the site. I’m sure, though, people will pick it up and we’ll see them pop up in more blogs soon.

12PM — A list of contemporary blog platforms, hosted and self-hosted, free and paid. I would also add two old-school options to the list: MovableType and Typepad.

7PM — From Justin Hall’s links.net to blogs to Twitter, Megan Marz explores thirty years of creative writing on the internet. My lack of nuanced understanding of the English language makes it impossible for me to view dril’s gush of tweets as literature, but, yes, any from of writing is literature. And so we should treat some online writing—certainly not everything—in the same way we treat books: Review, criticise, understand the context and archive.

1PM — From Tim Carmody on Threads:

I think Threads is picking up steam not least because it’s a social network with so they say) a ton of numbers. I still don’t feel great about handing Meta the keys to my public life (I have private FB and Insta accounts for people close to me). And the communities on Bluesky and Mastodon feel (in very different ways) more like my people. But I’ll keep exploring it here, keep connecting, watch it change and grow.

This, as an addition to Can We Really Fix the Internet?, explains why I think not much will change going forward. Tim Carmody wants a different, more open Web centred around blogs. And yet Threads is a viable option because that’s where most people are. Like I said, it’s convenience that lures people in, not doing the right thing.

7PM — Interesting view from someone currently starting out with a blog and how today’s guides on starting and writing a today are written with eventual monetisation in mind.

Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To “convert” our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we have to say simply isn’t enough? Personally, I want nothing to do with it. I’m sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet.

Ironically, it was early bloggers who thought about monetisation long before big tech intruded the space. Around the time when Kottke and Gruber went full time, ad networks for bloggers were created, mommy bloggers reviewed diapers and bearded dudes in gingham shirts wrote about their experience on that new farmer’s market—in return for a couple of dollars.

Sure, it all got worse, a lot worse, once the marketing departments rolled in and talked about publication schedules, personal brands and building an audience. But the foundations for what we’re seeing today, influencers advertising rubbish products, these foundations are rooted in the early blogging community.

9PM — Syndicating content from your website to other platforms should be a two-way process:

When it comes to maintaining many different networks, Mullenweg thinks, ultimately, POSSE is a user interface problem. And a solvable one. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s the right UI for this,” he says. “I think there might be something like, the first step is posting to my blog, and the second step is I get some opportunities to customize it for each network.” Where POSSE has gone wrong so far, he says, is by trying to automate everything. “I’m really into this two- or three-step publishing process to get around this.”

Posting a piece and syndicating it everywhere are two related but separate steps in the publishing process. Fully automated syndication solutions often reduce the second step to posting the headline and a link it to some social-media silo. But pieces generate more interest if the social media post provides context. Outline the premise of your writing in a sentence or summarise your thoughts in 280 characters. Syndication tools should be designed in a way that takes this into account.

5PM — Kottke is bringing back comments on selected posts and only for kottke.org members. Maybe the Web is coming full circle and we end up where we were in 2003, a least in a little corner of the Web. That would be nice.

8PM — Automattic now hosts an archive of Harvard Blogs. “The Harvard Blogs network that the Center launched back in 2003 was an important milestone in internet history. It provided a platform for over 1,500 high-impact bloggers—including Harvard students, faculty, fellows, staff, and alumni—to publish and engage in discussion.”

8PM — Wordpress.com introduces the 100-year plan, including domain registration and hosting of your Wordpress site for 100 years. Generally a great idea to ensure our content survives us, but what happens if Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, does not survive for 100 years? Matt Mullenweg won’t be alive that long to safeguard his company. What if Automattic is sold by his successor and the new owners decide to shut it down?

8AM — People and Blogs is an upcoming series by Manual Moreale, about blogs and their authors:

I’m starting a new weekly series called “People and Blogs” where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow it here on the blog and via RSS. The first interview will go up on September 1st and I’ll post a new one each Friday.

What a great idea, I’m hoping to discover some new sites.

8AM — Reasons why you should write a blog, even when no-one else cares:

You can say whatever the fuck you want. It’s your blog, you don’t need to follow any rules. I just cursed and you can’t do nothing about it, because this is my blog and I do what I want.

You control this website and nobody can take it away from you or limit what you write. That’s one of the best reasons to write a blog.

5PM — Shiobi is a bare-bones blogging tool using plain-text files and shell scripts to manage content. Content is published as plain text as well, no HTML, no styling—just content. RSS is the only “fancy” feature here.

7PM — Ethan Marcotte started a long Mastodon thread where people post links to their favourite blogs.

9AM — A Working Library turns 15. It’s one of my favourite places on the internet not only because of the site’s admirable design but because of Mandy Brown’s spectacular writing:

The new stuff sits next to the old but doesn’t supplant it, doesn’t shove it out of the way. Each new post lays atop the next like sediment, and all the old layers remain exposed for you to meander through, with their mediocre sentences and lapsed claims, all the sloppy thinking ever on display.

This one’s about maintaining a blog, if you haven’t noticed.

3PM — The Blog Era, a new podcast series, explores the world of hip-hop blogs, which shaped the whole industry and media coverage during the form’s hey day from about 2007 until its beginning demise around 2012.

5PM — Pixel Envy redesigns. Pixel Envy’s design hasn’t changed dramatically since 2013. I liked the old site, it still smelled like the good-old days of blogging. The new design is a little too modern and I’m not a fan of the three-column layout that puts headlines alongside the posts. But that’s just me, I’ll get used to it.

1PM — Dave Winer has trained a chat bot with content from his almost 30-year-old blog. You can play with it yourself.

Seems to work like a charm.

9PM — indieblog.page lets you discover blog posts from independent publishers. You can randomly access individual posts or subscribe to an RSS feed that regularly provides links.

2PM — What does it take to create a blog with minimal technical knowledge? Manuel Moreale explores the idea in Minimum viable blog.

His argument misses important aspects that make hosting a blog difficult for novices. Once you bought a domain and have a couple of HTML pages that link to each other, how do you get the pages to a computer connected to the internet so people can read your words? And how do you point the domain to that place? Creating a page is the easy part. What makes hosting websites hard is all the things that Manuel didn’t cover.

9PM — Montaigne is an interesting low-tech approach to Web publishing: Save notes to a dedicated directory in Apple Notes and automatically publish to a website, including an RSS feed.

6AM — A little nugget by Nick Herr I enjoyed:

[…] newsletters and personal blogs — which are actually the same thing, but I do not think the investors backing Substack have noticed

It’s funny, ‘cause it’s true.

1AM — Ryan Broderick predicts how AI, now introduced to search engines, will change the never-ending quest to route internet traffic to websites:

On the brand side, companies will pay for greater visibility in the A.I. recommendations. For instance, a car company might pay to be among the options listed for “the best mid-size sedan” by the A.I. for a financial quarter. There’ll be all kinds of fights about what is and isn’t an ad.

Google adsense-like programs for A.I. citations will roll out for smaller publishers and the last remaining bloggers, like the food writers who make the recipes the A.I.s are spitting out. There will also probably be some convoluted way to reformat your site to better feed the A.I. And I imagine Google will probably also figure out a way to shoehorn YouTube in there somehow.

And, finally, all of these initiatives will lead to a further arms race between A.I. platforms and individuals using A.I. tools of their own to game the system, which will further atrophy the non-A.I.-driven parts of the web.

I hope I’m wrong!

I hope he’s wrong too.

7PM — Clive Thompson advocates for us to use RSS to rewild our online attention—away from algorithmically curated timelines. Since I went back to RSS, first through a weekly summary via email, now with NetNewsWire, the material I read is more diverse and more thoughtful. There’s noticeably less repetition. Sharing a link on a blog requires more effort; there simply is no retweet button to drag a post into your timeline. And that’s a feature of blogs.

8AM — A very dry recount of events and numbers, A Brief History of Blogging is an interesting document of 2011’s zeitgeist. Its predictions are both wrong and spot on at the same time.

Blogs are unlikely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot of room for growth and innovation in method in which their content is found, delivered, and accessed.

Blogs mostly disappeared from the public eye because the methods for distributing and accessing content changed dramatically in the years after.

1PM — Unsolicited blogging advice by Manuel Moreale:

[T]he vast majority of the people out there won’t give a shit about you and your content. And that’s OK. It’s even comforting. Don’t waste time figuring out the perfect way to say something or the perfect topic for your blog. Don’t go insane curating your online persona. Be yourself. Be authentic. […] Post a picture every now and then, talk about a book you read or a movie you watched or a place you visited. Talk about an interesting conversation.

It may be unsolicited advice, but it’s sound advice nevertheless.

11AM — The New York Times published a piece about engineering blogs at tech companies. Major news outlets writing about blogs again—is the current resurgence of blogging real?

2PM — Samuel Pepys, a civil servant who lived in London in the 1600s, wrote a diary for ten years, which is now considered one of London’s main records of life at the time. Pepys’s diary covers monumental events like the Great Plague or the Great Fire of 1666.

In 2002, Phil Gyford started publishing the diary in blog format, one post every day, and repeated the reading from 2012. The third reading starts later today. Each post is extensively annotated with contextual information and is well worth a read.

12PM — For anyone maintaining a blog, remember you’re not writing for The New Yorker:

A post doesn’t have to have a destination, a point. You can bundle or concatenate several different topics, push into adjacency things that don’t obviously or naturally belong together - like oddments inside a Cornell box. You can start somewhere and end up somewhere completely different, without any obligation to tie things up neatly. Unlike most paid journalism, you are unshackled from release schedules or topicality - able to address anything, from anywhere, and anywhen. Lovely too the way you can illustrate with videos and images (always the danger of getting a bit carried away there) while linking to related writings by others or the texts that spurred your essay into existence (again, tempting to overdo).

12PM — Desktop blogging editor MarsEdit 5 is out, introducing micro-blogging, Markdown syntax highlighting and a new rich-text editor. Now, I need to implement AtomPub on the site so I can start using MarsEdit.

9AM — In The Blog Cycle (from 2005), Anil Dash traces the typical discussions within blogging communities as they evolve from initial formation to maturity. I wonder if we’ll see this pattern again if the current interest in weblogs continues.

12PM — Speaking of Matt Webb, his blogroll is an absolute treasure trove.

Back in the old days, many blogs had a blogroll listing links to other blogs the author followed. Blogrolls were the way to discover new blogs and rediscover old ones. With the arrival of Tumblr, Medium, and Substack, which mostly replaced publishing on self-hosted and self-built websites, blogrolls disappeared almost completely.

But there’s hope. Matt’s blogroll lists more than 200 blogs, most with RSS feeds, including many old gems I had forgotten and many I had not yet heard of before.

4PM — Matt Webb set himself 15 rules for blogging as a guide to post more often without overthinking the process. He has posted to his blog for 139 consecutive weeks. That’s getting close to three years. Looks like it works for him.

9AM — ooh.directory is a categorised directory of over 850 blogs, including a feed of the most recent posts.

8AM — Bear Blog is another unobtrusive new blogging platform. It supports the basics: No trackers or JavaScript, custom domains, themes, and feeds. There’s also a version for self-hosting.

5PM — Simon Willison uses an interesting analogy to explain how Mastodon works. It’s like blogs. You can host your own or use a shared instance, and it also acts as a feed reader.

I sure hope that the rekindled interest in blogging won’t be stifled by everyone just moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Despite what everybody says, how different Mastodon feels, the parts I always hated about Twitter, the condensed hot takes optimised for likability and shareability and devoid of nuanced thinking — we would see that too on Mastodon once it takes off.

8AM — What to blog:

A blog post is not the same as an essay or article. It’s simply an update to the log of information you’re writing on your website. That stream of posts, together, makes up your blog. So a post can be as short or as long as you like. It’s your voice, so they can also be as formal or informal as you like.

11AM — Nicheless is a micro-blogging service that limits posts to 300 words, and doesn’t publicly display replies, likes, and follower count.

12PM — Feedland is a new feed reader, developed by RSS veteran Dave Winer, but it’s more than that. It’s an attempt to build a community around feeds, you can explore other people’s feed lists, see what’s popular, and like and subscribe. Ken Smith has a nice write up on Feedland.

8PM — Get Blogging!

9AM — Scripting News, one of the earliest weblogs, is still going. David Winer has been writing the site since 1994 and continues to do so, with several daily updates.