Substack reportedly asking Australian users to verify their age

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Substack reportedly asking Australian users to verify their age

2 February 2026

According to a Reddit thread, that was re-posted at Marginal Revolution, the online publishing platform is requesting users in Australia submit to an age verification process.

Substack, as of the time I type, is not on the list of websites, or services, that Australians under the age of sixteen cannot access, so I’m not sure why Substack would be doing this. If indeed they are.

On a visit to Substack, again, as of the time I write this, I was able to access, and move around the site without hindrance. I was not logged in, but was using an Australian ISP.

Evidently some people are having difficulty though. Possibly age verification only applies to people in Australia who are logging in to gain access. I might try doing this another time.

But Substack is a platform, and who knows, may one day be added to the banned list. This is precisely why online writers should be publishing from their own, independent website, and not a platform.

And this is before addressing the concerns many people have with Substack in the first place.

Blogs are Back: easily follow website and blog RSS feeds with one-click

26 January 2026

Subscribing to RSS feeds is my preferred option for following websites, but for people unfamiliar with the really simple syndication system, doing so can be daunting.

I’ve long thought subscribing to a website needs to be as easy as following someone on a social network. Tap the follow button to follow, and you’re following.

But following a RSS feed — doubtless something anyone reading this post could do in their sleep — isn’t necessarily straightforward. People first require a suitable RSS reader, again, something that’s easy when you know how. Then they need to go about the process of obtaining the URL of the RSS feed they wish to subscribe to.

But there’s more than one click involved in this process. While it’s easy as pie for some of us, I can see why many people decide not to bother, or simply stay on the socials instead.

Blogs are Back, created by Travis Van Nimwegen, an American software engineer, might be a solution to the one-click subscribe conundrum. Blogs are Back is two things: a directory of personal websites and blogs, and a simple way of following the RSS feeds of listed blogs.

Click the follow button of a website of your choosing, and that’s it.

Posts from any website a Blogs are Back user subscribes to will be visible in the integrated RSS reader. There’s also an option to submit a blog if it’s not already in the directory, and the more websites present, the better.

I’m not sure if an ubiquitous app/website, allowing people who know nothing at all about RSS, to follow RSS feeds with ease, will emerge — it seems to me RSS is mostly for those publishing their own RSS feeds — but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

The highs and lows of publishing contributor dependent websites

21 January 2026

Manuel Moreale writing about People and Blogs, where he features regular interviews with bloggers:

It sucks because, since day one, I tried to find a good balance between keeping the series running smoothly and not letting guests wait for months and months to get their interview published. But I’m at the point where I can no longer do that. More than a few times, I found myself with the queue completely empty while waiting for dozens of people to get back to me. Every time someone came through in the end, and the series kept marching on week after week, but let me tell you: it’s not fun.

For a few years, between 2005 and 2007, I published a website about the creative and artistic work and projects of Australians, called OnVoiceOver (Internet Archive link). The name was a geeky word play on OnMouseOver, an old JavaScript event handler.

But OnVoiceOver, or OVO as I’d call it, was not an interview series like People and Blogs. Interviews with well known web people were already common circa 2005, and I wanted to try a different approach. So instead of posting interviews with people, I wrote an article about their work.

OVO also sported an ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, on account of its (intended) periodic publication schedule. I tried in vain to get an ISSN for disassociated, but was told blogs were not considered to be periodic publications. Oh, really?

OVO was (mostly) fun while it lasted. Some of the people I featured included Cameron Adams, who later co-found Canva, artist and writer Lang Leav, and artist Brad Eastman.

Long story short: I’d contact someone I wanted to profile (though sometimes people messaged me). After they agreed, I’d send them some questions, and use the answers, once received, to write the article. Once three articles were finished, I would then publish a new edition.

Like People and Blogs, OVO, despite the sole Australian focus, should have had sufficient fodder, content wise, to remain publishing indefinitely. After all, new and exciting ideas were coming along constantly. It’s not like there was nothing else to write about, after I posted the twenty-seventh, and final, article in August 2007.

But I was also in the situation where I was waiting on people, who had agreed to participate, some of whom I knew personally, to get back to me with their answers. On the other side of that, there were those who had returned answers, wondering when their feature would be posted.

I’d sometimes desperately trawl through news and forum posts of the likes of (erstwhile) Australian design portals, Australian Infront and Design is Kinky, to see if there was an idea I was able to quickly work with, so the next edition could go out. Perhaps my decision to post articles in groups of three was not so clever after all, and I should have gone with a single article format.

But I doubt that would have made much difference. I know everyone who participated was busy. They had jobs and careers to focus on. They had families to spend time with. When I’d follow up, I’d often receive messages to the effect of “oh yes, I keep saying to myself I must answer these questions as soon as possible”.

OVO quite likely had a less pronounced profile than People and Blogs, but it surprises me would-be participants are dragging their heels. A People and Blogs profile must be accompanied by a pleasing spike in traffic, and likely some new readers in the process.

In the end though, it wasn’t a few people not returning their answers to me that spelt the end of OVO. Migrating disassociated to WordPress, in mid 2007 was what did it. Somehow interest in the WordPress-ed version of disassociated skyrocketed, almost overnight, and visits increased ten-fold within a few months. This was, of course, the so-called golden-age of blogging.

My energy and focus was firmly there by that point. Eventually enough people returned answers allowing me to publish a final edition of OVO in August 2007, six months after the previous one. About two years later, OVO officially went into hiatus. The website remained online for quite a while, and in 2019 I finally relinquished OVO’s domain name.

Since my days of publishing OVO — and it did occur to me this was happening twenty years ago — I’m far more cautious about publishing what I call contributor dependent content. I try to do as much as possible here by myself, even though some of us like to think this is a collaborative medium.

I also seldom involve myself in other people’s projects, aware that my taking months to make a contribution, after saying I’d do so “in a few days”, is not helping matters.

But for the frustrations that come with operating People and Blogs, I remain hopeful the interviews will continue to be published for some long time to come yet.

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blogs, self publishing, trends

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

Write more, about anything, on a personal website, not social media

2 January 2026

Fernando Borretti:

I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts.

I’m the same.

There are probably quite a few people writing, or posting publicly, but much of that content ends up on social media, rather than a personal website or blog. Let’s do more to encourage independent online publishing on personal websites and blogs.

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blogs, self publishing, social media

Are you a ‘small i’ indie web, or ‘capital I’ IndieWeb, publisher?

30 December 2025

Chris Shaw, writing at uncountable thoughts:

The IndieWeb is, as far as I can tell, a community of people who advocate certain digital principles and support each other in working towards those. The most famous principle is Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There are a variety of initiatives such as the monthly blog carnival (which I have hosted in the past) and online/in-person meetups.

The indie web, on the other hand, is a (very) much larger universe of websites run by individuals who wish to express their independent creativity.

You can, as I am, be an indie web publisher, without being an IndieWeb publisher.

Many personal websites and blogs pre-date the IndieWeb movement, sometimes by well over a decade, but align with some IndieWeb principles. I am definitely in that category, and henceforth shall refer to myself as a ‘small i’ indie web publisher.

What happened to Problogger and Darren Rowse?

8 December 2025

A reader contacted me a few days after I mentioned blogging resource Problogger, and founder Darren Rowse, in a recent post. They were wondering if I knew anything about what’s happened at the site, or to Rowse himself, as no new content seems to have been posted since June 2024.

For those coming in late, Problogger was, or still is, one of the preeminent blogging resource sites, helping people who want to make money from writing online. The publication was launched by Melbourne based Australian blogger Rowse in 2004.

Despite being dated June 2024 though, some of the recent Problogger posts were actually much older. A few I looked at had — judging by the age of the comments — been written in 2008, and were re-posts. Evergreen content. But there was nothing — as far as I could see — indicating the site was taking either a temporary break, or ceasing operation all together.

It seems odd that a website with the profile of Problogger would suddenly fall silent, for no apparent reason. Of course long running single author blogs take breaks now and again, whether for personal or family reasons, or because the writer simply wants some time out.

Publishing content regularly is no small ask, as anyone who does so will tell you.

A look at the Problogger open-to-all Facebook page likewise revealed nothing. The last entry there, as of the time I type, is dated December 2024. The Twitter/X page however is a little more active, the last post I saw there (login may be required to view) was dated 18 November 2025.

But a Twitter/X post made on 15 April 2024 seems to answer the question of what’s become of both Problogger and Rowse: he’s now a church pastor, or at least is part time. As Rowse points out though, this is not exactly a new role, and was something he was doing prior to launching Problogger over twenty years ago. This might be him going back to his roots, perhaps.

I’m not sure what this means for the future of the Problogger website, given Rowse doesn’t appear to have said anything one way or the other as yet. There are still plenty of blogging related posts on his Twitter/X page, which might suggest Problogger will be revived sometime in the future. But until something official is said, Problogger readers will have to wait and see what happens.

On the plus side, even though posting seems to have paused, the website remains online, and content is still there to access. While it’s not quite my thing, it would still be unfortunate if twenty-plus years of information were to be taken offline.

As an aside, I also found out Rowse has been exploring how AI can be of use to religious leaders (Threads post). This might be of interest to people curious as to how religion and AI can intersect.

Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

4 December 2025

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites.

With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was founded last year, but has a growing membership.

Their goals are similar however, says Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).

Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog

1 December 2025

Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website:

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

Presumably, if someone writes a comment, that is actually a post on their blog, in reply to something I’ve written here, I’m notified in some way. Further, I can then allow that comment/blog post to appear as a comment on my website, if I so decide. But there’s nothing new about writing responses to another person’s blog post, on your own blog.

Once upon a time, the only way to “comment” publicly on someone else’s blog post, or rather, an online journal entry, as they were once called, was to write a post on your website in response. This is because early blogs didn’t have commenting facilities. Back then, the tool closest to permitting any sort of on-site public interaction between website writers and visitors, were guestbooks.

But guestbooks — intended really only to allow visitors to leave brief, and usually complimentary messages — were hardly an appropriate forum for discussing blog posts, particularly if these conversations were in-depth and involved numerous participants. But unless a visitor told the writer about their post-in-response, just about the only way a writer might find out was through their referrer logs.

But writing blog posts as comments is a practice that has somewhat been revived by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community. A blogger might respond to this post, on their website, using the title “Re: Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog”. They might also send a pingback, a webmention, or an email, advising me of their blog post.

Being able to reply to blog posts with comments though made for a convenient way to host a centralised discussion about an article, rather than having fragments of it scattered across the web. Centralisation can have some benefits. Readers no longer needed a website to respond to a blog post, and often only had to supply an email address, whether real or not, to air their thoughts.

And so the discussion flowed.

But we all know what happened next. Free-for-all commenting was a boon for spammers. Winer’s blog discourse system would create a hurdle for spammers, who likely would not have a website they could post comments to. Of course, serious comment spammers could setup a blog to publish their spam to, but perhaps the discourse system will have a way for dealing with that.

The blog discourse system also addresses another matter few people give much thought to: comment, and by definition content, ownership. Who “owns” a comment I leave on someone else’s blog? Me, or the website owner? If I append my name, I am identified as the writer — am I not? — and intellectual rights and what not, are mine, even though the publication is not.

Most likely that is the case. Perhaps though, somehow, someone with the same name as me, might claim the comment as theirs, particularly if they see some value in it. I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens, if at all, probably never, or incredibly rarely. But if my comments in reply to other people’s posts are published at my website, and then “syndicated” as an approved comment, the possibility of ownership conflict is removed.

What I wonder about though, is where do the comments I write, which are a response to a post on another person’s blog, end up on my website? Will these be funnelled into a separate content stream? I’m not sure I like the idea of comments intended for other blogs, featuring on the main feed of my blog, amongst my regular posts, even if I did compose the comments.

And will differing content management systems be able to talk each other? For instance will a comment-post made on a WordPress blog, post seamlessly onto, say, a Ghost blog? What of bona fide commenters who do not have blogs? Questions remain to be answered then. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about Winer’s discourse system, and seeing it in action.

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