the Isles of Blogging
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.
Note to self: I really need to do a massive cull of my RSS feed reader now, before I post the next list of my reading. There’s a ton of dead blogs in there, and, frankly, a lot of what remains is boring the crap out of me, which is holding me back from actually opening the reader on a regular basis. I’ve just knocked around 500 pieces out of it and still have 600 unread posts. Gonna be doing some simplification this autumn, I guess. I want to be excited to open it and see what’s new again.
I also need to figure out templates and formats on this thing. “Status” and “Aside” post formats seem no different from the usual.
I remember being floored when I was told that suicideblonde on tumblr posted every twenty minutes, all day.
I stopped “advertising” this site on social media years ago. Even disabled the machine that syndicated posts out to social – I imagine that doesn’t even work any more anyway, with all the changes in social media over the last year. I was reading a piece on thejaymo earlier that confirmed what I’d been hearing – that social media doesn’t create “growth” any more. Discovery is broken, largely by design. On the newsletter a few weeks back, I called it “social media winter.” The piece I read suggested that someone with two million followers on TikTok could only lure 400 of them to their long form YouTube channel. That’s a crazy level of broken machinery. I said in the newsletter that if you use social to keep up with your friends, then get them to move to new channels with you and keep them close. For the rest of us: well, we are all digital notebooks now. Writing just for ourselves and whoever finds their way to our caves to look over our shoulders as we scribble thoughts down in public and daub pictures on the walls.
This is not, I think, a bad thing. Shit might get weird and experimental out here in the Isles of Blogging again. I’ve lived through all the different versions of digital publishing, and none of them are coming back. But maybe there’s still space to do something new out here, in the places where no-one is looking.
This isn’t it, of course. Blogging about blogging used to be a Crime – although Robin Sloan has recently pointed out that it was also super generative. Perhaps talking about it again will get people thinking about it again, and that’s a good (re)start.
(I wrote this in IA Writer, something else that seems to play poorly with WordPress after all)
Cleared this bed and took off the buddleia hanging over it, half-mulched it before my back started twingeing, so I’ll mulch the other half tomorrow and get some vegetables sown. I’ve got to cover that bed, and the old hose I found in the back garden doesn’t have enough strength to make into hoops to suspend netting from.
The other point of today’s posting has been – the iOS WordPress app is not what it was. Image uploading and publishing seems to be hit and miss, and getting podcast details from Downcast into WP is annoying. I also suspect I’m bumping up against some issues in my WordPress theme, Alia.
Making notes in a notebook should be a function, not a chore. Not something that requires extra processes and jobs. It should be pretty much as easy as picking up a pen and writing in a straight line. (Some days that too is a challenge!) This is why we all loved tumblelogs, back in the day – clean and easy.
I believe experiments are in order.
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.
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.)
A Phil Gyford project, ooh.directory is “a place to find blogs that interest you.”
Phil has long been an boon to the living web, and I think this project comes along at just the right time. There are something over 1200 blogs listed on the directory right now. Get yourself an RSS newsreader.
Back in the distant web past, Jemma Gura used to run a site called Prate, which was always defined as “Prate™ Computer Channel.”
I always took the “channel” thing to heart – years ago, I’d begin a day’s posting here with a startup or station ident and end the day’s posting with a Closedown. The sort of thing that you’d see in early Twitter usage, where people would bookend a day’s activity with “good morning” and “good night.”
When I returned to blog writing, I had the intent of creating longer, more evergreen pieces. And I did a few, and would like to do many more. But the energy and inspiration just haven’t been there, especially as I began driving into creating a slate of original audio-drama podcast productions. The newsletter tends to suck up more of the joined-up thinking than it should.
But. As I’ve noted here, this place has value to me as a personal digital tool.
I’m conceiving of it, at this time, as the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.
Perhaps it was always supposed to be a computer channel. Not just a repository of thoughts and information on storytelling, culture and knowledge work, but also the digital diary for the things I can’t easily record with a pen, and the low-power radio station run by a single hermit with a battery-operated transmitter who just rambles into the ether from startup to closedown.
A long time ago, I used to use Windows Live Writer to post to blogs. And then Microsoft took it away. Because who cared about enabling blog writing, right?
Today I discovered Open Live Writer – an open source recreation of the original. It has a website, which seems a little dusty, but it worked well enough to download this program I’m writing in right now, which took about five minutes to set itself up.
It feels like an old application. It has that slightly cramped and clunky pre-Windows 10 feel: thin where it should be thick, cornered where it could be rounded, a little gappy here and there, icons just a bit too small. But right now it works smoothly, and is just simple enough to remove the frictions that most online publishing introduces now.
I was actually looking for a free visual HTML editor, because I can’t code and I want to figure out the envelope edge of the newsletter system. But finding this was a pleasant surprise.
I’m writing this post in Typora on my main laptop.
I often write my newsletters in the Typora app, or straight into the Buttondown text window, which toggles between Markdown and “Rich Text.” My newsletters have got very long and rambly.
My blog posts are most often written directly into the WordPress post window. My posts are getting shorter and more stuttery.
I have a feeling the current iteration of WordPress posting is getting in the way of my flow.
I mean, I always wanted LTD to be more controlled and focussed than the more personal newsletter writing. But the difference is getting ridiculous now.
I’m reconfiguring the newsletter to stop me rambling into it so much, but I also need to take a look at what’s getting in the way here. I suspect it’s the “Blocks” thing — there’s a tendency to have to mouse around to click the Add Block thing to start a new paragraph with my preferred spacing, rather than flow into it, and little elements of formatting that introduce little pauses into the writing. The sense that every element of a piece needs to be in its own little box and closed off.
Typora doesn’t connect to WordPress, so I will have to select all and copypaste this in to WordPress. IA Writer on my iPad does, but it dumps the piece in as an untitled draft. But, right away, this is flowing better, but when I copy it in to WordPress, my paragraph breaks vanish and I have to put them in by hand. So I need to apply some new tools. None of which is to take away from WordPress – I’d be lost without their special application blocks, the custom HTML and shortcode inserts and all. But, for me, they do seem to enforce a more staccato form of production. Going forward, I need to solve that.
Anyway. Once again, the cardinal sin of blogging about blogging. But, since I think some people who write on blogs read this, maybe there’s some use for them in here, as well as me getting my thinking in front of me.