Tags: blogs

Blogs Are Back

A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.

Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost

See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog

Ah, the circle of life!

What happened to the comment section? - The History of the Web

I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.

There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:

A blog without comments is not a blog.

That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:

Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.

That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.

I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.

Echoes of Connection · Matthias Ott

Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:

I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.

I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own.

Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the slipperiness of the term “AI”.

Then Jim Nielsen wrote a deliciously satirical piece in response to my pithy little parable about research.

I love it when this happens!

Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote a piece called What Made Blogging Different?:

And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through.

It’s so true. I feel like a response from someone’s own website is exponentially more valuable than a response on Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, or any other social media platform.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the way that Brid.gy will send those social-media responses right back here to my own site in the form of webmentions. It also pings me whenever someone likes or shares a post of mine. But I’ve noticed that I’m not that interested in those anymore.

Maybe those low-investment actions were carried over from the old days of Twitter just because that’s the way things were always done, without us really asking whether they serve much purpose.

Right now I accept these likes and shares as webmentions. I display a tally of each kind of response under my posts. But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I don’t particularly care about these numbers. I’m pretty sure no one else cares either.

If I cared, then they’d be vanity metrics. As it is they’re more like zombie metrics. I should probably just put them out of their misery.

I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out!

Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already.

There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that Harry is going to give…

Earlier this year, Harry posted a most excellent screed in which he said:

The web as a platform is a safe bet. It’s un-versioned by design. That’s the commitment the web makes to you—take advantage of it.

• Opt into web platform features incrementally;
• Embrace progressive enhancement to build fast, reliable applications that adapt to your customers’ context;
• Write code that leans into the browser, not away from it.

Yes! Exactly!

Thing is, Harry posted this on LinkedIn. My indieweb sensibilities were affronted. So I harangued him:

You should blog this, Harry

My pestering paid off with an excellent blog post on Harry’s own site called Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web:

The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.

That’s a pretty neat summation of the agenda for Web Day Out. So I thought, “Hmm …if I was able to pester Harry to turn a LinkedIn post into a really good blog post, I wonder if I could pester him to turn that blog post into a talk?”

I threw down the gauntlet. Harry accepted the challenge.

I’m sure you’re already familiar with Harry’s excellent work, but if you’re not, he’s basically Mr. Web Performance. That’s why I’m so excited to have him speak at Web Day Out—I want to hear the business case for leaning into what web browsers can do today, and he is most certainly the best person to bring receipts.

You won’t want to miss this, so be sure to get your ticket now; it’s only £225+VAT.

If you’re not ready to commit just yet, but you want to hear about more speaker announcements like this, you can sign up to the mailing list.

We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web

The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.

P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu

In which I answer questions about blogging.

I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.

I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.

I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.

Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).

Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.

I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.

To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!

Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.

I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.

I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.

So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.

I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.

If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.

That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.

It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.

We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:

thesession.org/donate

So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Once Again From the Top • Jason Santa Maria

Welcome back, Jason!

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

A couple of days ago I linked to a post by Robin Sloan called Is it okay?, saying:

Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models.

That’s how it came across to me: fair and balanced.

Robin’s central question is whether the current crop of large language models might one day lead to life-saving super-science, in which case, doesn’t that outweigh the damage they’re doing to our collective culture?

Baldur wrote a response entitled Knowledge tech that’s subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that’s obviously wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan).

Baldur pointed out that one side of the scale that Robin is attempting to balance is based on pure science fiction:

There is no path from language modelling to super-science.

Robin responded pointing out that some things that we currently have would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago, right?

Well, no. Baldur debunks that in a post called Now I’m disappointed.

(By the way, can I just point out how great it is to see a blog-to-blog conversation like this, regardless of how much they might be in disagreement.)

Baldur kept bringing the receipts. That’s when it struck me that Robin’s stance is largely based on vibes, whereas Baldur’s viewpoint is informed by facts on the ground.

In a way, they’ve got something in common. They’re both advocating for an interpretation of the precautionary principle, just from completely opposite ends.

Robin’s stance is that if these tools one day yield amazing scientific breakthroughs then that’s reason enough to use them today. It’s uncomfortably close to the reasoning of the effective accelerationist nutjobs, but in a much milder form.

Baldur’s stance is that because of the present harms being inflicted by current large language models, we should be slamming on the brakes. If anything, the harms are going to multiply, not magically reduce.

I have to say, Robin’s stance doesn’t look nearly as fair and balanced as I initially thought. I’m on Team Baldur.

Michelle also weighs in, pointing out the flaw in Robin’s thinking:

AI isn’t LLMs. Or not just LLMs. It’s plausible that AI (or more accurately, Machine Learning) could be a useful scientific tool, particularly when it comes to making sense of large datasets in a way no human could with any kind of accuracy, and many people are already deploying it for such purposes. This isn’t entirely without risk (I’ll save that debate for another time), but in my opinion could feasibly constitute a legitimate application of AI.

LLMs are not this.

In other words, we’ve got a language collision:

We call them “AI”, we look at how much they can do today, and we draw a straight line to what we know of “AI” in our science fiction.

This ridiculous situation could’ve been avoided if we had settled on a more accurate buzzword like “applied statistics” instead of “AI”.

There’s one other flaw in Robin’s reasoning. I don’t think it follows that future improvements warrant present use. Quite the opposite:

The logic is completely backwards! If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let’s be generous), then that’s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.

You don’t get companies to change their behaviour by rewarding them for it. If you really want better behaviour from the purveyors of generative tools, you should be boycotting the current offerings.

Anyway, this back-and-forth between Robin and Baldur (and Michelle) was interesting. But it all pales in comparison to the truth bomb that Miriam dropped in her post Tech continues to be political:

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

Boom!

Maybe we should consider the beliefs and assumptions that have been built into a technology before we embrace it? But we often prefer to treat each new toy as as an abstract and unmotivated opportunity. If only the good people like ourselves would get involved early, we can surely teach everyone else to use it ethically!

You know what? I could quote every single line. Just go read the whole thing. Please.

I’ve been tagged in a good ol’-fashioned memetic chain letter, first by Jon and then by Luke. Only by answering these questions can my soul find peace…

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

All the cool kids were doing it. I distinctly remember thinking it was far too late to start blogging. Clearly I had missed the boat. That was in the year 2001.

So if you’re ever thinking of starting something but you think it might be too late …it isn’t.

Back then, I wrote:

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.

I’m glad I didn’t commit myself but I’m also glad that I’m still posting 24 years later.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I use my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and MySQL. Before that I had my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and static XML files.

On the one hand, I wouldn’t recommend anybody to do what I’ve done. Just use an off-the-shelf content management system and start publishing.

On the other hand, the code is still working fine decades later (with the occasional tweak) and the control freak in me likes knowing what every single line of code is doing.

It’s very bare-bones though.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I usually open a Mardown text editor and write in that. I use the Mac app Focused which was made by Realmac software. I don’t think you can even get hold of it these days, but it does the job for me. Any Markdown text editor would do though.

Then I copy what I’ve written and paste it into the textarea of my hand-cobbled CMS. It’s pretty rare for me to write directly into that textarea.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m supposed to be doing something else.

Blogging is the greatest procrastination tool there is. You’re skiving off doing the thing you should be doing, but then when you’ve published the blog post, you’ve actually done something constructive so you don’t feel too bad about avoiding that thing you were supposed to be doing.

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to posting something. I find myself blogging out loud to my friends, which is a sure sign that I need to sit down and bash out that blog post.

When there’s something I’m itching to write about but I haven’t ’round to it yet, it feels a bit like being constipated. Then, when I finally do publish that blog post, it feels like having a very satisfying bowel movement.

No doubt it reads like that too.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately. I’ve never kept drafts. Usually I don’t even save theMarkdown file while I’m writing—I open up the text editor, write the words, copy them, paste them into that textarea and publish it. Often it takes me longer to think of a title than it takes to write the actual post.

I try to remind myself to read it through once to catch any typos, but sometimes I don’t even do that. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s the web. I can go back and edit it at any time. Besides, if I miss a typo, someone else will catch it and let me know.

Speaking for myself, putting something into a draft (or even just putting it on a to-do list) is a guarantee that it’ll never get published. So I just write and publish. It works for me, though I totally understand that it’s not for everyone.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I’ve got a little section of “recommended reading” in the sidebar of my journal:

• Split
• Web! What is it good for?
• Seams
• Hyperdrive
• Design doing
• Iron Man and me

But I’m not sure I could pick just one.

I’m very proud of the time I wrote 100 posts in 100 days and each post was exactly 100 words long. That might be my favourite tag.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I like making little incremental changes. Usually this happens at Indie Web Camps. I add some little feature or tweak.

I definitely won’t be redesigning. But I might add another “skin” or two. I’ve got one of those theme-switcher things, y’see. It was like a little CSS Zen Garden before that existed. I quite like having redesigns that are cumulative instead of destructive.

Next?

You. Yes, you.

On Transient Slash Pages • Robb Knight

This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:

I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.

People spent a lot of time and energy in 2024 talking about (and on) other people’s websites. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. Even LinkedIn.

I observed it all with the dispassionate perspective of Dr. Manhattan on Mars. While I’m happy to see more people abondoning the cesspool that is Twitter, I’m not all that invested in either Mastodon or Bluesky. Or any other website, for that matter. I’m glad they’re there, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d carry on posting here on my own site.

I posted to my website over 850 times in 2024.

I shared over 350 links.

I posted over 400 notes.

I published just one article.

And I wrote almost 100 blog posts here in my journal this year.

Here are some cherry-picked highlights:

• January: Continuous partial ick — Voigt-Kampff.
• March: What the world needs — Write for yourself.
• April: My approach to HTML web components — Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
• June: Filters — A web by humans, for humans.
• August: Frostapalooza — A truly special event.
• November: The meaning of “AI” — Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

I described using my feed reader like this:

I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.

Instead it’s like this:

When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book.

It also feels different to social media. Like Lucy Bellwood says:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

There’s also the blessed lack of any algorithm:

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.

Cory Doctorow has been praising the merits of RSS:

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface.

Like Lucy, he emphasises the lack of algorithm:

By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

The only algorithm at work in my feed reader—or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate. Like this morning, when I read this from Alice:

There is no better feeling than walking along, lost in my own thoughts, and feeling a small hand slip into mine. There you are. Here I am. I love you, you silly goose.

And then I read this from Denise

I pass a mother and daughter, holding hands. The little girl is wearing a sequinned covered jacket. She looks up at her mother who says “…And the sun’s going to come out and you’re just going to shine and shine and shine.”

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.