Category: blogging

Posts about blogging

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List of Good Ways to Blog

If you want to have your own homepage or a blog, here are the ways I recommend.

Blog Hosting services

Advantage: Very little setup. You just get and account and start blogging. Low learning curve. If you can type a text document you can use these with little help. You don’t even need to know HTML. Concentrate on the blogging, not the technical backend.

  • Micro.blog – very full featured, multiple membership tiers.
  • Scribbles.page – great and simple system with simple and elegant themes
  • Pika.page – also great and simple, with a nice user interface
  • Bearblog.dev – a popular system that is also great

These are all great, and make it easy to get started. You can buy your own domain name and have it attached to your site. They are all reasonably priced. I mean – super inexpensive. I don’t recommend using blogger or other free services due to 1)advertising and 2)it’s owned by Google.

These are all small business, owned by one or maybe a few people. All good people. Your money will not be going to make a more terrible world.

Static Sites/Wordpress Installations

For a few dollars a month you can have space on a server where you can either 1) Do a one-click installation of the WordPress blogging system or 2)do things oldschool, and have a static site that is built by hand or with a Static Site Generator.  All of this is a bit more involved. The static site stuff in particular takes a bit more knowledge but can be very rewarding

  • Dreamhost.com: allows a one-click install of WordPress. You can also upload static webpages, like you would have done in 1994, which has advantages.
    NeoCities.org: allows you to have a free account and server space with a limited number of pages/storage. Can upgrade to more for a reasonable fee. Upload and host your static site here.
  • Other hosting services – it is very inexpensive to have hosting space somewhere. An example is Nearly Free Speech. These require some knowledge of HTML to write the page and understanding of how a website should be structured.
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New Project

As many of my readers know I love playing around with new blogging systems. It’s a hobby.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a project to really work on during retirement – trying to come up with an idea. I have built a lot of skateboarding sites over the years. Right now, run bloftin2.blog as my skateboarding blog. I enjoy running it. I post anything I want about skateboarding there. Videos, opinions, pictures of boards, whatever.

For the last week I’ve been fiddling around with a blog hosting service called scribbles.page. I really like the user interface. I like the styling of everything. The developer has been improving it a lot lately. So I began playing with this site, Radio Lefty. It is a skateboarding site, but rather than just being “anything” about skateboarding, it’s intended to be about my life experience in skateboarding. A bit more emotional depth. What it means to me, especially as I age.

Will anyone read it? Maybe a few. You don’t create real blogs to get thousands of page views. You do it for yourself, and maybe someone else enjoys it too.  That’s my opinion anyway.

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Interview Answers

If someone interviewed me about blogging, and asked about my “work flow”, I would tell them I don’t really have work flow. I just start typing, on whatever device I’m on, in whatever application or sited I want to or is available.

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Website Details, Blogging, and Ethics

First. Yes, I’m posting a lot today.

A couple of years ago when I “discovered” the notion of the IndieWeb I also spent a lot of time exploring blogs. By blogs, I mean REAL blogs. The kind written by real human people, about their lives and opinions and ideas, on which they are not trying to sell things. I don’t like that the interwebs have become, in the mind of the Great Unwashed Masses, just a marketplace. I don’t like “app culture”. So I looked for other bloggers doing good work and started following them via RSS (in my case, using the Reeder app — yes — I know – a fucking APP!!! — but in this case it’s doing the lord’s work).

If you still don’t know what RSS is and why it can make your life better, read this thing I wrote.

So, getting to the point…

I found the blog Minutes to Midnight, by a person who would become an internet/blogging friend, Simone Silvestroni. Looking over his blogroll I found other good writers. I also discovered the word “colophon”, which I will be adding to this site, but more importantly on his colophon I found some really interesting information that I actually care about. In particular, notions of website accessibility and how green a site is. Lots of good links and info on that page! For example – links. Look people. Links need to be easy to find. The text needs to be a different color, have enough contrast to the rest of the page, and be-fucking-underlined. Likewise, I learned about green websites — sites that use less energy to serve up a page. And page design that uses less energy. I think Minutes to Midnight is where I learned to stop being obsessed with analytics and to not spy on my readers (or help Google spy on them).

I was surprised to find that the host of this site, dreamhost.com, seems to use a green amount of energy. I’ve tested the pages here. I was very surprised to see that my micro.blog sites aren’t as green as my dreamhost sites. I am not stressing about it, because honestly my sites over there get so little traffic. I’m working on getting all my sites nice and accessible. The biggest issue on micro.blog is that I tend to change themes on some of them a lot, and it takes to put the link underlines back in. This site could be greener. It runs on WordPress. Honestly, I’d rather it be static pages, but at this point I’m not going to convert over 1000 posts and pages. In the future, however, who knows?

One thing I’ve become more aware of is the effect of images and video on my pages. I’m trying to be more aware of not using images or video unless they are really the point of a post. If words will get the job done I just type the words.

October 6 will be the 20-year anniversary of this blog.

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Writing

When people ask me what I like to do, besides skateboarding, RPGs, and Aikido, I tell them reading and writing.

I think it surprises some folks to find out that I write a lot. I write every day. I this this and other blogs. I write tabletop RPG stuff for my campaigns. I’ve been keeping a physical, paper journal for nearly 20 years.

I write a lot. Almost compulsively. I have a few readers (I think), but since I stopped using analytics on my sites I have no idea unless someone comments or writes me an email.

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Blog More

A blogger I followed shared this post, Your words are wasted, this morning. It’s a 13-year old blog post about why you should own your own content, mostly likely on your own blog, with your own domain name and all that. Basically all the IndieWeb principles.

I know I go on about this topic a lot. I’m sure my friends are tired of hearing me talk about it, but this is my blog and so, well, here I go again.

Edit: I wrote a bunch of boring paragraphs under this line, which I just deleted, because good God they were just not needed.

OK, now that my edit is out of the way, here is what I have to say.

If you want a web presence, have a blog. If you don’t know how to do that, ask me. It’s really that simple. If you must use social media, use it sparingly. If you must use social media, consider using Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse stuff and bringing your friends along. As soon as advertising, MAGAs or other kooks, or AI bots show up on a social media silo, stop participating.

That is all.

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Blog changes and stuff

This morning I indulges in some obsessive blog theme adjustments. I changed the color of all the links. I felt like the previous maroon shades were kind of harsh. I didn’t like them. My goal is that this blog be easy to read. It is, in the end, about the words. I think the various blue shades retain plenty of contrast, and the mouse-over pink let you know you are on that link.

I’ve been fiddling around with other blogging platforms a lot, but I’ve had this blog running on WordPress for almost 20 years. I just can’t see changing it until the day comes that this theme is no longer working with the system and there are no good themes available. Now, that might seem crazy, but I have looked and for the most part all the themes are horrible corporate bullshit looking things.

However, this theme looks good on computer, phone, or tablet. It works. So I’m sticking with it.

While I do maintain some blogs over on micro.blog, I am not crazy about the notion of having my main blog housed on a “service.” Micro.blog is fantastic, but the owner is one guy. He’s a genius, but he’s one guy. Same with Bearblog. Hosting on Dreamhost.com — having my own WordPress installation or whatever static site I might decide to build, seems a bit more solid.

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The Kids ARE Alright

This is post 999 for this blog. I had considered making it Post 1000, but I might just post a picture of my cat for that.

For the last few months I’ve been frequenting this message board, 32-Bit Cafe.  I’m amazed at the creativity and honesty I see on the sites there. It is beautiful. Seriously – just so great. This is what the internet should be about.

I’ve been blogging for 20 years. Longer, really, but this blog will be 20 next year. When I started it I had no idea that in 20 years personal blogs would be the last refuge of the “good” internet.

But they are.

Young people, at least some of them, are rediscovering the power of blogging. The 32-Bit Cafe is but one example. These are the cool kids. Seriously. These are the youth that recognize the bullshit of the current corporate internet and have found a way to express themselves away from social media. They find community, they create, they use the internet the way it really should be used — with some level of personal autonomy. These are not the kids trying to “leverage AI” to make the world a worse place. These are the young people who care about authenticity.

They get it. This gives me hope.

I am, as I sit here typing this, 60 years old. I plan to continue until the day I can’t type anymore. Oh, I might have to change platforms at some point, but this blog will continue.

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The Internet is Amazing

I’ve been reading a lot recently about how shitty social media has made the internet. I agree. What started out as promising has really turned to crap. At the same time, I’ve been very immersed lately in learning about the IndieWeb, the “small web”, and such.

For a “normal person” — someone who wasn’t in the tech or academic realm until 1994 — I feel like I was a pretty early adopter of the internet and web. I detail my introduction to the internet and the World Wide Web in this post on my other blog, Me and the Internet, Part 1. (Yes, my blogging has been kind of divided for the last year or two. Been blogging over at micro.blog because I like the platform a lot and it is very interesting.)

I’ll get around to writing part 2 soon enough, detailing the years from 1999 to 2010 when I ran the first skateboard trick archive with video. A site called Bob’s Trick Tips, which got 40,000 page views a day and nearly blew up my credit card with pre-cheap bandwidth/pre-YouTube bandwidth charges.

My point, I suppose, is that since 1994 there has never been a time when I didn’t have at least one personal website. Until I discovered Moveable Type and then WordPress they were for the most part hand-coded (except for running phpBB message forums and trying out a few content management systems).

Further, my point is that I’ve been creating websites and using the web for so long I think that until tonight I had really forgotten how amazing it is and how amazing it can be. When I started on the internet, the browser that came on the floppy the university gave me was Mosaic. There were hardly any sites compared to today. I used Gopher and Telnet to connect to servers all over the country and the globe. It felt fucking incredible. I mean – INCREDIBLE. From our crappy apartment off the drag by UT Austin, with our 28.8 modem and our new Macintosh Performa computer we’d taken out a loan to buy, we could connect with people a world away. It was quite literally William Gibson shit (I’d just read the Sprawl Trilogy).

For the full story, read that post I linked to earlier on the other blog.

Tonight I got an email from Matthew, who runs the starbreaker.org blog and site. We’ve been corresponding a bit. He mentioned that he loves building static sites, just him and a text editor and pushing that stuff up to a server pointed at the internet. That is power. And man, he struck a chord with me. I’ve been thinking so much about how fucking punk rock blogging and/or personal sites are. In fact, I wrote this thing about it recently. But Matthew’s words were simple and powerful. Yes – with a computer, a simple text editor, an FTP client (or maybe just some browser-based upload setup), and some storage space on a server, YOU can publish stuff that can be seen all over of the world. THE WORLD. That is a damned low barrier to entry, because truth is you could go to the public library, use their computers and internet connection, and their books to learn HTML and if you are feeling industrious CSS, and BOOM. You can have your own manifesto on the internet for all the world to see and fear.

So yes, I am unhappy that social media has made its inevitable transformation into mountains of fecal matter. Yes, I’m unhappy that for so many the internet is just a place to 1)buy things (though god damn I do love buying some things)and 2)plugging in to the 24-7 outrage machine, BUT I feel reminded and more aware than I’ve been in years that the old internet is still there and it is still absolutely fucking amazing.

I understand that not everyone has this crazy compulsion to post their thoughts, the records they buy, the shows they see, and pictures of their cat to the internet, but I really want to encourage friends who are so inclined to do it. I mean, you can have your own domain name so cheap every year, and web hosting even cheaper.

Tonight I created this simple page, by hand, in a text editor. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I can write basic HTML and build sites from memory. I need a little refresher and some references to do CSS. And of course, I embedded a video from my Vimeo account just to see how it looks. The only hard part was finding the meta tag that made it look good on a phone (without the right tag the text was super tiny). Yes, it’s a shitty page, but not really. It loads fast. Regardless what device you see it on it works. Turns out that plain old HTML is nice and responsive. I’m going to work on it as a site. Get the style sheet the way I want it, see if I can find a good way to generate an RSS feed without automating the whole site with a static site generator. But Matthew was right. Writing it on a text editor and pushing it up to my server with an FTP client is wizardly and grand, which I had forgotten.

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RSS – the Simple Guide

RSS is a means by which you can easily keep up with updates to your favorite websites, all in one place.

You will often see the term “RSS Feed” or see this image associated with it…

RSS logo

When you click on that link, you will usually see a scary page of gobbledygook that looks like this (click here). What you are seeing is the RSS Feed, the content of that website crunched together in a certain format that can be read by your new hero – the RSS Reader.

You don’t need to worry about all that scary code. All you need is the address of that feed.

So, how do you use this?

You download an RSS Reader app to your phone, tablet or computer. Sometimes you’ll see them called RSS Aggregators.

If you are on a computer you can also use a website like Feedly.com.

You just copy the address of that RSS feed, hit the “add” button on your reader, paste in the address, and you will now see every single fucking update to that site. And you do this for every website you want to follow. And you can read the articles in the reader, which means it usually strips out all the ads and bullshit.

If you have not used RSS before, something like Feedly is a good way to get introduced to it. I prefer using a standalone RSS app, even on my computer, to avoid tracking and adverts.

Note: almost all blogs have RSS feeds, even if you don’t see the link. That’s because a lot of blog theme designers suck and don’t make them apparent. With most modern RSS readers, you don’t even need the exact feed address. You can just enter something like “https://bobsawesomesite.com” and the reader will find the feed for you.

As a MacOS/iOS user I use Reeder on my devices as my RSS reader. I also like NetNewsWire. Reeder seems to sync well across all my devices. If I follow a site from my phone, it shows up in Reeder on all my devices. Some web browsers have built-in RSS readers, which is cool.

There are similar readers available for PCs and Android. Just search for “RSS Reader” or “RSS aggregator.”

Here are some screen shots of Reeder, on my phone. You can see how many unread posts are on each site that I follow. For example. The Twilight Sessions has one new post.

Reeder app screenshot

If I click on the Twilight Sessions, it shows me the most recent posts. I can tap one and read it from within the Reeder app.

Reeder app screen shot

Now for the fun part.

Why can’t you find an RSS feed for your friend’s Instagram or Facebook account? Because there’s not one. Those social media silos don’t provide RSS because they want you trapped on their sites and apps. It is that simple. So fuck them. If a site does not have an RSS feed, they are not worth your time and fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

 

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The Greatness of the IndieWeb

I just watched this video about the IndieWeb vs Silos, from 2014. Yes. Ten years ago. It is about 14 minutes long. Worth your time.

The silos have gotten worse in 10 years since this talk. Much worse. Most of the other services mentioned, especially those from Google, were shut down.

But THIS SITE – CONCRETELUNCH.INFO – is still here.

If you had a blog back in the early 2000s I’ll bet it is still there too. Or event the late 2000s. Or even the late 90s.

All the current shit – Facebook, X, Bluesky, blah blah blah – all those silos will die, and the blogs will remain. The IndieWeb is where it’s at.

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Test Blog Update

I’ve made some progress using Jekyll to create a static-page test version of this site. Just making some test pages and trying to see how it will work.

I’ve got a few things to figure out still. For example, the RSS feed is doing some weird stuff, but I found some info that I think will fix it.

One of the disadvantages of the static site generator is that it pretty much lives on one computer. It creates the pages and updates everything, saving to a folder on the computer, which you then upload oldschool-style to your server. So this means I can’t just jump into the post editor from whatever computer with an internet connection I happen to be using.

Like a lot of people, I think I’ve gotten used to the convenience of being able to access and edit documents and projects from nearly anywhere. Google Drive, stuff on iCloud, Dropbox, whatever. It’s all super convenient.

So why am I obsessed with this step back 20 years? I think there is a certain amount of nostalgia involved, for sure. There’s also an element of control. Much less worry about people hacking the static site and stuff like that. I like the community of people I’ve found who are into this kind of thing as well (https://indieweb.org/)

Also, I was in a conversation with an internet-friend the other day on micro.blog about how punk rock it feels to have a blog. I agree, and I have a lot to say about that, and sometime in the next month or so I will likely write a long post about it.

 

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A New Version of Concrete Lunch?

I’ve been doing nerd things.

I’ve been playing around with a static site generator called Jekyll.

What is a static site generator, you might ask?

Well, if you created web pages/sites in the old days, you likely wrote every one by hand. That HTML file contained the whole page, with links to images or whatever. There was no database backend, no embedded javascript, etc. If you were really fancy and smart (like me!), you used Server Side Includes to standardize your header and footer, so you’d only need to change it in one place if you wanted it to change across your whole site.

Flash forward to the late 2000s/early 2010s, and platforms like WordPress, Blogger, etc came about. They use more sophisticated means to deliver webpage. There are databases involved, lots of code and other shit. It’s all very cool. This site runs on WordPress.

You also have to update your site’s content management system (in this case WordPress) pretty often, as hackers and scumbags are constantly trying to log into it, hack it, steal your information, blah blah blah. All that complexity-based convenience comes with a price.

Another price – in theory these content management systems are kinda slower serving up pages, since they are doing a lot more on the backend.

BUT — these days there are number of programs like Jekyll that generate static pages for you, which you then upload to your space on a server (just like in days-of-yore). Since the pages are just HTML, some CSS, and whatever media you might embed in them, they are less vulnerable to hacking.

Also in theory, all else being equal, since there are not database calls involve and other technical fuckery, the static site should serve up to readers much faster (again – depending on connections speeds, etc., which is true for CMSs too).

The drawback?

You have to work harder setting it all up. You have to understand some stuff like installing things from the command line/terminal/whatever. It is all a lot nerdier than just going a Blogger or WordPress site.

Clearly I have too much time on my hands (I don’t).

So here is test.concretelunch.info. Since I’m just figuring this out, the homepage is still a level down in the directories, but whatever. You get the idea. There is supposed to be a process for moving a WordPress blog over “easily” (it is never easy). We’ll see ….

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Science Fiction Micro.blog

A few friends know I’ve been keeping a blog just about my science fiction reading for the last year or so. I started it back in April 2023 (I think), when I began my 5% per day reading challenge. https://bloftin2sf.blog. I haven’t really promoted it much because it is really just a personal blog for my own tracking and reflections on reading. In other words — probably not that interesting to most people.

One feature I love on micro.blog is the built-in ability to track your reading. Could have something to do with the fact that the developer, Manton, is a reader. Might also have something with his wife, Tracy, having gone to library grad school and being a reader.

Here’s my 2023 year in books, as tracked via Epilogue and Micro.blog. https://bloftin2sf.blog/2024/02/28/year-in-books.html

At any rate, Manton has created a simple system for tracking and blogging about your reading. He has a companion app for micro.blog called Epilogue, which makes it simple to track your reading from your phone or tablet. He’s done all the work to draw the book information from legitimate bibliographic sources. This is available even on the base $5 per month micro.blog account.

I’m not planning at this point to move Concrete Lunch to micro.blog, as I have a few friends who enjoy commenting here. Micro.blog does not have a comment function, and thus there is no comment spam or harassment. You have to comment through the micro.blog interface, which is limited to users. They do a great job of keeping the system clean.

As part of the fediverse, micro.blog makes it easy to post there and syndicate your writing and other media to other parts of the fediverse, like Mastodon, BlueSky, etc.

The simplicity of being able to post from my computer or easily from my phone with micro.blog is great. The $10 per month premium account allows you to upload videos or podcasts of up to 45 megs, which is a short video or a mid-length podcast. All of this is unattached to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or any of the other commercial sites. Hell, you can run a podcast from micro.blog without having to have an account anywhere else. Amazing value.

Forgot to mention. They just changed the $10 per month account so that you can host up to 5 blogs for that one monthly charge. The service just keeps getting better.

Yes, I can create a post on the mobile version of WordPress, but frankly the interface it clunky and crowded. WP is still great for running a more full-featured site or portal, but it has really grown beyond the notion of “blogging” — a web log. Micro.blog is focused on blogging.

More and more I’m convinced the future of a quality internet is going revolve around pay services. Sure, there will be social media and massive sights like Youtube that are full of great stuff and lots of shit to wade through and put up with, who sell your data to every marketer in the world. And there will be a small fraction of the web that is curated, not free to every lunatic with a phone or computer, and of higher quality, that respects the privacy of its users.