Skip to content →

Category: the isles of blogging

the Isles of Blogging

Published May 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The other night, my partner was telling me that a bunch of her friends were talking about the tv show BABY REINDEER, and I commented that nobody will even remember it in a month – the half-life of hit streaming shows is like ten days now.

This afternoon, I opened this post from Jay Springett:

The idea that a new work must come out, be consumed, burn bright before we all collectively move on to the next thing is a crazy one. It’s rotting peoples brains, its rotting culture.

The other week a friend was bemoaning in the group chat telling us about the following interaction Her newest book came out in February, and she was being interviewed on a podcast. During the conversation the host apparently straight up ask the following (I’m paraphrasing): “Why are you still talking about your book? what about AI? what about xyz? whats next for you?”. Translated: Why are you still, 4 months on, talking about the book that took you 3 years to write?

The whole thing feels very sharp and true to me.

Had the show dropped weekly as ‘appointment viewing’ we’d all still be discussing it. And thats just better for culture. Fallout would have stayed at the edge of the cultural zeitgeist for 8 weeks, not 10 days. Its release would have had a bigger, deeper cultural impact. It would have had a chance to begin the process of ‘settling in’.
Comments closed

Cory Doctorow Blogging Style

Published February 21, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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.

3 Comments

A Starter List For Your RSS Reader (Updated Jan 2024)

Published January 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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.

One Comment

Published January 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed

Blot, The Blog Tool Nobody’s Talking About

Published January 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed

Published October 2, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed

Published September 25, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed

Published September 24, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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)

One Comment

Published September 24, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed

A Small Alteration

Published July 5, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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.

Comments closed