Tag: blogging
Turning a Blog Into a Book
Wouter Groeneveld published a blog post on his blog, Brain Baking, titled The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book. I have thought about creating a book from the millions of words I have published on The New Leaf Journal, so I read Mr. Groeneveld's article with interest. His project is along the...
Giving Defunct Blogs Proper Burials
Robert Birming published an interesting short blog post titled Where do blogs go when they die? He noted having noticed that many blog posts shared in recent years by participants in his Junited initiative are no more. From the outset, I agree with Mr. Birming that bloggers can end their blogs at any time and...
Beyond blogging platforms
A blog is a blog is a blog. At least that's what I used to think. In reality, it isn't quite that simple. Some people just blog and don't care about the machinery behind it. Others see the technology powering their site as an important part of the experience. I clearly belong to the second group. After years of more or less radio silence, I started writing regularly again last year. At the time I moved to Micro.blog and genuinely enjoyed it. But the longer I used it, the more time I found myself spending behind the scenes. I built plugins, tweaked workflows and started thinking about the platform almost as much as the writing itself. Like every platform, Micro.blog has its limitations. Over time, I realized that I was spending more and more energy working around them and optimizing things I could not even clearly define anymore. Almost out of nowhere, I moved everything to Bear Blog, which probably takes the exact opposite approach. Bear Blog focuses on the one thing a blog should…
Publish from WordPress to the open social web
FOSSE is a developer preview of a WordPress plugin that brings ActivityPub and AT Protocol publishing into one setup wizard and unified admin surface.
Feeds: a Minimal RSS Aggregator and Client
There are many like it, but this one is mine
This is not my first blog post.
In fact, if I ever decided to make a real tally, I think the result would be in the high hundreds. I have had a lot of different blogs over the years, in many different blogging platforms. I've witnessed the slow death of personal blogging and the birth of aesthetic curated posting, themes going from quirky and fun to the nauseatingly pervasive white clean aesthetic we see today. I've followed blogs from teenagers and witnessed them become adults with careers - some abandoning blogging altogethe...
Another blog on the internet
First post on the blog of Chris Parsons. Talking about why I want to write.
Spring Website Updates
Some fun updates I've made to my personal website
Hello World
Hi! I am Jürgen and I have a blog now. Here's the why and the how.
Aufgeräumtes Zuhause
Felix hat vor kurzem dazu aufgerufen, das man sich ein Zuhause im Netz baut. Mein Blog ist im Grunde schon seit 2002 mein Zuhause, auch wenn es viele Jahre gab in denen es brach lag und ich mehr als einmal mit dem Gedanken gespielt habe, es endgültig zu löschen. Zum Glück habe ich diese Entscheidung immer ausgesessen, auch wenn ich in der Vergangenheit nicht immer so egal unterwegs war. So wie bei Felix und vielen anderen auch, ist meine Webseite mein kleiner Hobbykeller im Internet, oder anders gesagt, eine einzige Dauerbaustelle. Man schraubt hier, man optimiert da und so gedeiht alles vor sich hin. Heute, während ich kränkelnd auf der Couch saß und mich frage, was die nächste belanglose Ablenkung auf Netflix sein kann, die einfach nur leise durch mein von Ibuprofen vernebeltes Hirn rieselt, habe ich mit etwas Abscheu auf eben jenen Hobbykeller geschaut. Im Second-Screen, wie man das eben heute so macht. Symbolbild Rumpelkammer (Foto: Mr. Brown, Unsplash) Dann kam die Erkenntnis:…
Introducing Sequoia: Publishing for the Open Web
A new CLI tool for publishing existing blogs to the AT Protocol
Standard.site: the Publishing Gateway
Another deep exploration into ATProto and implementing lexicons
ATProto, POSSE, and Personal Sites
My little weekend experiment to bring micro updates to my personal site
2026, the Future of this Website, and the Web Itself
A small reflection and set of plans for making a ripple in a big lake
Better Admonitions for Bear Blog
#### Changed website theme I changed my theme, so the admonition boxes look different on this page, but the CSS shown below still gives you the Github style admonition boxes you can see in this example. I wanted to add nice admonition boxes to my Bear Blog, but pasting HTML div structures felt clunky. Even worse, I couldn't use Markdown to add formatting or links to these boxes without resorting to raw HTML, which even more felt like having tag-soup. While adding buttons to my Markdown toolbar helped automate the process, it still didn't feel like a clean solution. Then I discovered how GitHub handles Admonitions using simple Markdown. Since that unfortunately doesn't work in Bear Blog, I hacked together a way to get that same Markdown-first experience. I decided to repurpose the lower-level headings inside a blockquote. This keeps the content in pure Markdown while giving the browser enough "hooks" to style them as Info, Warning, or Caution boxes. How it works To use this, just add…
Requiem For Early Blogging
From Requiem For Early Blogging: [I]f you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. [...] I think of this...
Hello Bear Blog 👋🏼
Today, I finally made the switch to Bear Blog and left Micro.blog. When I started using Micro.blog earlier this year, I was incredibly bullish about it. I even merged my Mastodon account into the platform, convinced I would never need anything else. The concept that everything I post ends up in my blog is truly amazing. Over the course of the year, I learned the good and the not so good things about this decision. On the positive side, I very often had a thought in my head which ended up to become a blog post as I just continued typing. I never had to switch to another app or website, just because I hit some character limit. I strongly believe this very convenient publishing workflow led to way more and longer posts. On the other hand, using Micro.blog often felt like trying to go to the supermarket with an Airbus. There is literally a setting for everything. The product is built for technical-minded people like me, but as someone who also cares deeply about user experience, I found…
Building my Myspace
I mentioned on Mastodon that my wife lovingly (and jokingly) refers to my site as my Myspace. She's always right and this is no exception.
Resurrect the Old Web
Let's go back to when social media was about people
Blog questions and whatnot
I've seen the blog question challenge going around recently among folks I follow and bacardi55 was kind enough to tag me to participate. So, without further delay, here we go!
(Most) pages are actually posts
Adam wrote up a post about everything on a site being a web page — posts included. He's absolutely write. I have some pages I think of on this site as being static ( about , uses , colophon et al) and these are often slash pages . But they aren't static .
Gatekept
Thoughts on a bruise to the ol’ ego that hurt a little more than I thought it would. But hey, it gives me a chance to talk about gatekeeping.
A personal website is a bit like a quilt
If there's one thing I'm good at, it's torturing a metaphor. I grew up wrapped in quilts — my mom has made them for years (as a hobby and later, professionally). It's a passion, it's a patchwork assemblage of fabric — designs, patterns, mementos. They're handcrafted, require nigh-endless patience and the result is unique and irreplaceable.
Shields up
I have been getting so many political texts. All from the 202 area code. I have an ever-growing number of automations in Shortcuts.app that look for substrings and reply STOP. It's still noisy — and irritating.
It's not just a blog
Lately, one of the things I've most enjoyed doing on this site has been expanding on the facets of it that aren't strictly related to the blog. I've been working around the edges on filling out music, movie, TV and book related functionality.
The Post-SEO Era
What happens when a news site launches that basically ignores the SEO orthodoxy? Easy: They do fascinating stuff. Hence, Robinhood’s Sherwood.
The internet isn't dying, it's changing
Ok, maybe some of it's dying. I believe it's too far reaching and too deeply-embedded to really, truly be dying. What we're seeing is a bust cycle for commercial social media and information-driven platforms. It's pretty clear that traditional social media is on the wane — growth has plateaued for Facebook, cratered for Twitter (X — whatever) and Reddit's besieged users are being fed into the gaping maw of yet another AI product. They're not alone — so many of these platform companies are “evolving” to mine captive user data for AI models.
A Month with an iPad Pro
About a month ago, I bought a 2022 iPad Pro 11 inch (4th gen) used for about 800 EUR (Which, given they are still for sale on Apple’s site for nearly double that (mine is a 256Gb model with Cellular) I think I got a good deal. I also got my hands on the Keyboard...
The Curator’s Code, Reconsidered
Was building a language to properly give people credit a bad idea? If no, why did it get so much pushback? Let’s re-assess one of the most controversial ideas of the blog era.
The Pioneers
Now that everyone seems interested in blogging again, here’s a list of early and influential bloggers that helped to shape the genre. Maybe you can borrow some pointers.
The Technorati Generation
The search engine that kept up at the speed of blogging created a “search war” with Google. But eventually, the speed of blogging just wasn’t fast enough.
Blogging Bandwagon Jumpers
Are you starting a blog in 2019? Here's a list of some sites that I know are getting off the ground this year. Have one of your own? Let us know.
Let’s Save Blogging
The independent blog has been in decline for years. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why you should start a blog in 2019—and host it yourself.
Is Blogging Dead?
As some ponder whether the practice of blogging should be seen in the past tense, it may be better to consider what the concept gave us in the first place.
Blogging Before it Was Cool
Jerry Pournelle, who died last week at 84, was perhaps the first blogger, even if he hated the term. Here’s a reflection on the iconic former Byte writer.
Quitting is OK
Blogger Andrew Sullivan's decision to quit daily blogging is the kind of decision that everyone else eventually makes when they quit stuff.