Category: blogging

Posts about blogging

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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.