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Category: the isles of blogging

the Isles of Blogging

How To Build A Blog Without Social Media

Published March 7, 2023 by Warren Ellis

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.)

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Computer Channel

Published September 22, 2022 by Warren Ellis

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.

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Open Live Writer

Published July 5, 2022 by Warren Ellis

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.

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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.

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Wrangling Writing On WordPress

Published June 27, 2022 by Warren Ellis

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.

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LTD Development

Published June 3, 2022 by Warren Ellis

In this post, you can see a notebook marked “LTD.” This is where I jot down thoughts in pursuit of developing this creation into something more useful to me, and perhaps also to the occasional reader.

Position one: traffic doesn’t matter. A few experiments were conducted, and organic traffic is pretty much where it was before I took my long hiatus, minus the section of readers that arrived from social media, which I do not currently use. If I have a link posted for me on social media, the daily traffic average lifts back up to exactly where it was. So now I no longer look at traffic stats. I know what it is. That’s not what this site is for. This is a space for achieving personal goals: I’m using it to get thoughts out in front of me where I can see them properly, and if you’re here with me reading over my shoulder, I’m happy with that.

I note here this lovely little Cal Newport post on styles of digital minimalism, focussing on comedians like Aziz Ansari. My style is obviously very different – though my five-year-old iPhone is certainly starting to operate like his old Nokia flip phone at this point – but there are similar intents.

Position two: that this place should be a repository of all the things that interest me and teach me, under the general rubric of storytelling, culture and knowledge work. That’s the focus. This is a tool. That means, among other things, that I need to get better at deep linking back into the archive of the site. This is one thing that social media trained us out of. If you’ve been around a while, tumblelogs kind of did that to us too.

Position two needs to be questioned or codified, because I also use LTD as a personal log, much as I use my paper notebooks. It would be nice to run a Maria Popova-style repository of timeless essays, but I’m just not wired that way. My process seems to require me to note the passage of the days.

Position three: evolve the tools. Now, Matt Webb recently posted his tools for making his weblog. I have a vague memory of coming across an even more baroquely complex zettelkasten-style method, but I can’t find it now. I have, in fact, been losing stuff fairly regularly of late, and I need to figure out how to stop bloody doing that. I lost four hours yesterday trying to track down a bit of folklore that I either imagined, or read on paper and didn’t annotate anywhere searchable, or am entirely misremembering, because I cannot find it now. But there has to be an easier and more effective way for me to put extended thoughts and essays together, and I need to figure that out. This post has been in drafts for five days, and has been picked at during the week.

Modifier: “evolving the tools” becomes its own rabbit hole. Just learn the habit of putting stuff where you can fucking find it later, Warren.

Additional: I just saw this line by Jason Kottke – “What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs?” For me, that’s beside the point. I wish him well on his sabbatical.

As in Position One, I’m putting this up here where I can see it properly and think about it some more.

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Blog Diet: A Starter List For Your RSS Reader (Updated Spring 2022)

Published April 22, 2022 by Warren Ellis

(Updated Jan 2024 at this link here.)

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

I exported my subscriptions, and damn, there are a LOT of dead blogs out there. I’m actually shocked at how much of my list is now gone. (And how many sites have shut off their RSS!) Here is a selection of blogs from the list of ones I think are still active. Like I say, it’s just a bit of my active subscriptions list, but maybe you’ll find something you want to follow.

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Quotebacks

Published June 11, 2020 by Warren Ellis

“Quotebacks is a tool that makes it easy to grab snippets of text from around the web and convert them into embeddable blockquote web components.” It’s a Chrome extension. And it works in the Custom HTML block of WordPress, outputting like this:

Quotebacks is a tool that makes it easy to grab snippets of text from around the web and convert them into embeddable blockquote web components.

Which I find very clever and very useful. It presents nicely and speeds up certain of my operations here. Nice work.

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John Coulthart’s { feuilleton }

Published June 10, 2020 by Warren Ellis

Artist/designer John Coulthart’s journal — and I must have some of John’s earliest work, with Savoy, in the office here — is now his main channel, and he’s increasing his posting velocity. feuilleton has been a favourite for years, and I’m very happy to see more of John’s seeing and thinking.

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8sided

Published June 4, 2020 by Warren Ellis

Nice to see Michael Donaldson’s 8sided.blog make a bit of a comeback.

“I’ve always wanted a more personal flavor to this blog and some fun posts outside of essays on ‘music’s place in the 21st century.’ And, as I begin my exodus from social media, I’ll want to use this space to check in with the world. It’s my home base, after all — the hub of my digital world. So if you’re a regular reader or have this planted in your RSS reader, then, first off: thank you. And secondly: get ready for an increase in blogging action.”

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