Category: the isles of blogging

Which came to my attention via Bruce Sterling’s EYE BURNING Artmaker Blog. A series of posts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Bonus round:

https://doctorow.medium.com/tabs-give-me-superpowers-78a8121d6cdb

Bruce notes that it’s a lot of work. It’s a terrifying amount of work that starts at 5am every damn day. It obviously has returns for Cory, which he discusses in these pieces, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But it’s a scary level of dedication to surfacing and memorandising information. It includes essentially hand-rolling versions of each entry he makes for three different social media services. Cory wants reach for his ideas, so he has to arrange some kind of syndication, and he’s fighting against reduced use and reducing visibility on all those platforms. He believes that game is still worth the candle and applies fearsome dedication to it.

There’s a lot to think about here. I imagine most people would see his style as over-engineering and time-expensive. But he does it, and makes it work, and that makes it worth examining and considering.

People keep asking me where I find stuff, or where to start with an RSS reader.

If you happen to be discovering RSS for the first time, About Feeds tells you all you need to know, nice and easy. I use a paid app called Feedbin connected to an iOS app called Reeder, but, as you’ll see, there are plenty of free options out there. It is my massive daily magazine of the new and curious.

I recently did a cull of my list to take out all the dead sites. The following is my entire list as of today. Pretty sure all of these are still active. Maybe you’ll find something you want to follow.

• [RSS] Uses This – process/tool interviews
• [RSS] Wirecutter: Reviews for the Real World
• [RSS] Interconnected – blog
• [RSS] Sean Bonner
• [RSS] { feuilleton } – arts
• [RSS] Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
• [RSS] The Casual Optimist – design etc
• [RSS] Graphic Journey Blog
• [RSS] BruceS
• [RSS] Roads & Kingdoms
• [RSS] blissblog – music etc – Simon Reynolds
• [RSS] Disquiet – music/sound
• [RSS] Space News – Space, Astronomy, Space Exploration
• [RSS] Archaeology News
• [RSS] Fragmentary – Nick Harkaway
• [RSS] Everyday Carry
• [RSS] petriblog – music etc
• [RSS] Lines and Colors – art
• [RSS] 70s Sci-Fi Art
• [RSS] The Daily Notebook – film
• [RSS] Wyrd Britain
• [RSS] Strange Flowers – writing
• [RSS] Minimalist Baker
• [RSS] Study Hacks – Decoding Patterns of Success – Cal Newport
• [RSS] Artsy News
• [RSS] BLDGBLOG
• [RSS] Digicult | Digital Art, Design and Culture
• [RSS] Sougwen Chung (愫君) – artist
• [RSS] Monument – Connecting people through Techno music 🖤
• [RSS] The Pen Addict
• [RSS] IGNANT – art
• [RSS] ribbonfarm – philosophy/internet/whatever
• [RSS] Stranger Aeons – music
• [RSS] The Nordic Kitchen
• [RSS] Notebook Stories
• [RSS] Film and Furniture
• [RSS] neonlike.blue/notes – blogs
• [RSS] Stationary Travels – music
• [RSS] Juxtapoz Magazine – Juxtapoz Magazine – Home – art
• [RSS] nadreck.me – blog
• [RSS] José Naranja – artist
• [RSS] Colossal – art
• [RSS] 3:AM Magazine – lit/fiction
• [RSS] Blog – Journal of Futures Studies
• [RSS] The Art(s) of Slow Cinema
• [RSS] the blackberry garden
• [RSS] The Quietus | All Articles – music
• [RSS] Velcro City Tourist Board
• [RSS] CineVue
• [RSS] EFS Publications
• [RSS] Urthona – music
• [RSS] bookforum.com
• [RSS] We Make Money Not Art
• [RSS] Earthrid – music
• [RSS] True Crime Magazine
• [RSS] The Public Domain Review
• [RSS] ARTnews.com
• [RSS] G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y – artist
• [RSS] Experimental cinema
• [RSS] Destroyed and Abandoned
• [RSS] The Middle-Sized Garden
• [RSS] Film Ruminations
• [RSS] LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
• [RSS] Hermitary – hermit’s thatch
• [RSS] Hermitary – hermits around the web
• [RSS] World of Reel – film
• [RSS] SPINE – book cover design
• [RSS] thejaymo – blog
• [RSS] HTSI
• [RSS] Daily Rothko
• [RSS] Foxy Digitalis – music
• [RSS] magCulture – Journal
• [RSS] Contemporary Art Daily
• [RSS] Preserve & Pickle
• [RSS] Vertical Veg
• [RSS] Garden Therapy
• [RSS] Present & Correct – Blog
• [RSS] Forgotten Television Drama
• [RSS] LOGBOOK – RYAN DEWEY – photography/geology
• [RSS] The Zozzled Cocktail

Since I’m at the desk, and trying to figure out the transition between pages 11 and 12 in the script in front of me, I’m catching up on some reading.

WordPress bought a regional zoo called Tumblr and put a lot of money into an attempt to turn it into an international attraction. That didn’t go so well, so they’ve stopped all renovations and are focussing on just trying to keep the animals alive. Xitter is, according to Muskie, doing the “pivot to video.” Memory is so short now that nobody seems to recall the Facebook pivot to video, which seemed to be designed expressly to get news organisations to put a lot of money into video production. A year or two later, Facebook pivoted out of video and took away any algo advantage video had, and crashed a whole bunch of news businesses as a result. Given how much Muskie enjoys news investigations about himself and his actions, I can’t help but wonder if he thinks that can be done again. Instagram figured out the loophole that allowed people like me to view images through RSS and closed it. I have no idea what happens on Facebook or Threads or Bluesky or Mastodon or any of the other things. I use a newsletter called The Future Party to learn about TikTok and YouTube.

The recent talk in areas of the Isles of Blogging about some kind of return/evolution of the inter-blog communications of the 00s seems in part to be about social media’s loss of relevance. And, I guess, its failures to actually connect any more.

Jason Kottke’s melancholy “What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs?”  from the other year probably applies here too.

There’s a notion abroad that perhaps it is time for the independent hand-rolled personal web again. I have this feeling that it may be a sign of a maturing media landscape – when you’ve only got four channels and a handful of magazines, none of which speak to you, then it’s time for zine fairs, mail art, public access cable shows and the like, right? Everything old is new again. streaming FAST channels are essentially just basic cable and commercial television. All this we did, to reinvent that. Maybe that’s where things are now.

I read the news sites and newsletters I subscribe to, my RSS reader and the ooh.directory updates ticker.

Going through my RSS feed this morning, there’s a lot of talk about blogging in 2024 again, and also mention of people who don’t necessarily want to be tied into WordPress, or the apparently very complex static-site generator things. Nabil’s collation is the one in front of me right now.

Blot is an obvious choice. It’s cheap and it’s dead simple. If all one wanted to do was text and photos, it’s really the only choice. It’s also very well supported. You can probably make it do all kinds of things, but here’s the thing – Blot turns a folder into a website. Your Dropbox, your Google Drive or Git. You drop your text documents or your images into the folder and they publish.

If I didn’t need a broader range of tools for my own notebooking practice, this site would be on Blot. My identity site is on Blot.

it’s easy, robust, and, frankly, it’s really just dropping a txt file into a folder. You don’t need to go near anyone’s else’s web pages and programs and user interfaces. Learn the tiniest bit of HTML or Markdown for your links and inline images and you’re good to go. It’s five US dollars a month, which isn’t nothing, but it’s probably half the price of most other blogging solutions. And you’ll never lose what you wrote because it’s all in your own Dropbox or GDrive folder, copied back to whatever other storage solutions you use. There’s an almost zine-like vibe to Blot sites that I enjoy. Stripped back.

That’s https://blot.im/ for anyone who trips over this post and might be interested.

Working downstairs, piling up links that I cannot post here because I’m on an iPhone and an iPad, neither of which can usefully post to WordPress unless it’s a photo or plain text. Interesting to see how things have bottlenecked. Also annoying. No incentive for apps to usefully, richly connect to WP now.

This needs some consideration. I feel like an old timey radio ham in a world of…well, iPhones.

I’ve changed the top strap on the website. 18 months ago, it just read “storytelling, culture and knowledge work.” Around the start of the year, I appended “a writer’s notebook” to that. On Sunday, I cut “storytelling, culture and knowledge work.”

The original top strap was a reminder to myself that this isn’t a private notebook, and people can read over my shoulder, and that there was a point to my collections here. Now, it feels like it’s getting in the way of what the place wants to be, and the shapes of my days are distorting around it a little bit. So I’m going to try just letting it be what it wants to be for a while.

Vaguely related: I often think about Marc Weidenbaum’s “scratchpad” practise:

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week.

I’m curious as to how to adapt that without using social media.

Here we go again.

Previously.

Well, you can’t. Right?

That’s the received wisdom. You have to post on social media to direct people to your blog because nobody has RSS feeds any more, nobody curates what we used to grudgingly call “the blogosphere,” message boards in the old style are now Slacks and Discords and you can’t reach into those black boxes, and… blogs are old and niche now anyway. Microposting took away the impetus for most writers to self-publish.

Except some of us want to write complete statements in places we own and control, and garden our own thoughts and experiences in an interlinked, searchable way.

As I noted in a previous post, traffic to this site is predictable, and always has been. It got close to doubling if I had a link posted on Twitter, and went right back down the next day if I didn’t. Neither number is huge. LTD has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.

I would like to change that in 2023. I am also not using social media, and don’t intend to. If Twitter in 2018 didn’t hold any pleasure for me, Masto and Post aren’t going to get me in 2023. And with the changes to Twitter, it seems to many people like they’re technically shadowbanned if they don’t cough up for Blue. There is an argument for using social media as a syndication engine, but honestly, right now, I don’t see that game as being worth the candle.

So here’s my 2023 experiment. Building LTD up in a sustained way without doing the thing everyone’s been doing since the 2010s – leaning on social media as the one and only growth tool.

Let me point you now to ooh.directory, Phil Gyford’s growing directory of living blogs. And it updates live when any of them post a new piece. That’s one plank in a new stage for personal publishing. (Great job, Phil, by the way.)

“Growth” isn’t necessarily the thing that interests me. Doing proper work on this site, connecting things up properly, sustaining– these are the things to look at. Can it be done without having to send up brief, dim, desperate flares on social media a dozen times a day? Let’s find out.

(A not fully baked thought that I apparently wrote down on Jan 6.)