Some blogs are digital gardens, but not all of them

Showing all posts tagged: blogs

Some blogs are digital gardens, but not all of them

31 March 2025

Brisbane, Australia, based blogger Colin Morris, writing about website analogies:

My site isn’t a garden. I’ve seen garden sites, tended to grow and sprout and flower. Ordered in rows or disordered in natural growth.

disassociated is not a garden, a digital garden, either.

A digital garden could be seen as progression, an evolution even, of blogs and personal websites. Whereas content on blogs — old school blogs like this one — is usually considered complete when published, a digital garden’s content is often a work in progress. Articles, or posts, which start out as seedlings, are added to as research into their subject matter continues, or new information comes to light. It’s a sensible approach since knowledge is never complete.

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blogs, Indie Web, self publishing

Read Bean Ice Cream for dessert and other blogs

20 March 2025

Dave Winer is on the look out for old-school bloggers who have been writing since circa 2005, and are still going. Anyone who’s been blogging for twenty-plus years is certainly deserving of recognition, but let’s not overlook people are new to the game.

If there were an award for the most memorable blog name, then ReadBeanIceCream might well be the winner. Sylvester Ady is a Malaysian uni student writing about studying, time management, building websites and love. And probably more as time goes on.

The .uk domain threw me at first, but Sean Boyer resides in Canada. Music, politics, software development, and Linux (my favourite OS), are among topics he plans to write about. That’s how we did it in the old days, there was no such thing as niche blogging, it was a case of anything goes.

Aevisia has recently launched the Small Web Movement, a growing resource for people who want to setup their own personal websites in the Indie Web/Small Web spirit. And last, but by no means least, Indieseek.xyz is a web directory curated by Brad Enslen, dedicated to independent, and personal websites. Thanks for including disassociated.

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blogs, IndieWeb, self publishing

A personal website is a website published by a person

10 March 2025

I’ve always regarded disassociated as a personal website. Others might see it differently.

For instance, I read a few of the IndieWeb blogs, and when compared with some of those people, my website is not personal. I don’t usually write “dear diary” like journal entries, although I do publish a variation thereof, which I post to my socials feeds. But I don’t delve too much what into about I’m thinking about on a personal level, or what I’m grappling with in my day-to-day life.

Still, it’s a good question to ask: how personal should a personal website be? But it’s one only the person who owns the website can really answer.

Search engines and SEO are still useful for independent self-publishers

4 March 2025

From Joan Westenberg’s recent article: why personal websites matter more than ever.

SEO made it worse. SEO manipulation always favored platforms over individuals.

There’s little doubt rampant SEO manipulation deprived bloggers, independent self-publishers, of many readers in the past, and possibly continues to. But I still see good levels of referrals here via search engines, despite minimal utilisation of SEO. Maybe that’s because, ironically, I’ve always viewed SEO as a waste of time.

Back in the day when blogger in-person gatherings seemed to take place every other week, I took care not to bring SEO into any conversations I had. The dangers of doing so were akin to flying head first into a black hole. As in, sometimes there could be no escape. It seemed to me that if SEO wasn’t a thing, some people would have nothing else to talk about.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely want to bag out SEO either. Like it or lump it, SEO has a role, albeit a small role, in the work of independent self-publishers. Say what you will about search engines, and I know there’s strong opinions on the topic, but they still help people discover content and information, and reach this website. Even in the age of Google Zero.

And when it comes to content promotion, albeit passive promotion, search engines are far less effort than social media channels. For a long while social media channels were my main method of promoting content, but I was never fully comfortable doing things that way. I often felt I was foisting stuff upon people. Even though they had chosen to follow me.

Plus social media channels always felt like a distraction to what was really important: my website. Leaving the task of spreading word about my work to the search engines seems like a better idea, while allowing me to dispense with the socials. It’s truly a set and forget process. All I need do is publish, and move on to something else. The search engines do the rest.

Of course, that’s not the way anyone attempting to manipulate, or whatever they call it, the rankings, the SERPs, I think it is, see things. But the search engines are not oblivious to this activity, as much as an overstatement of the obvious that may sound. Because if SEO manipulation was truly excessive, surely anything I publish would go unnoticed by search engines, as it would be crowded out.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The search engines referrals may be modest, but deliver more than the socials ever did. Perhaps we can still dare to imagine that content remains paramount. Despite on-going SEO manipulation and, of course, ever present algorithms.

If IndieWeb took off, became mainstream, would it still be IndieWeb?

26 February 2025

The IndieWeb doesn’t need to “take off”, by Susam Pal.

It’d be great to imagine all those people who cling to social media — as if it were a life-support system — suddenly coming to their senses and launching personal websites. Owning their own content, on websites belonging only to them. And in the process, hastening the demise of the social networks, who would abruptly find themselves with no members, after the personal website exodus.

But as I wrote last May, such a groundswell would not be great at all. Because once the action returned to the website space, we’d see a repeat of what happened prior to the arrival of social media: websites monetised to within an inch of their life. And opportunists galore, looking for a channel to pedal their wares, and rocket the noise-to-signal ratio off the gauge.

Yet, such a cataclysm might have occurred in 2021, when now US President Donald Trump launched a blog, after being banned by Twitter and Facebook (how unimaginable such happenings would be today…). With his own blog though, Trump effectively became part of IndieWeb. But someone with Trump’s profile, going “IndieWeb”, could easily have opened the floodgates.

And it wouldn’t have just been the likes of Trump. Politicians of all stripes might have followed suit, if they decided IndieWeb was the place to be. When people talk of IndieWeb “taking off”, I somehow doubt that’s what they have in mind. But Trump’s sojourn into “IndieWeb” blogging was short lived. A few months later he launched his own social network, Truth Social.

On the other hand though, even if IndieWeb had, if you like, gone mainstream, IndieWeb would still be IndieWeb. It would have continued to thrive, right where it is now, in its own corner of the web. In a strange sort of way then, IndieWeb is all the richer for the existence of social media. Die-hard adherents can keep their algorithm chocked socials feeds, and declining engagement, leaving IndieWeb to flourish, and be what it is.

Twenty-five years blogging, the more things change, the less they change

21 February 2025

Matt Webb has been blogging for twenty-five years. What an incredible milestone. Obviously, much has changed in the realm of self-publishing since Webb started out in 2000. Back then, as he points out, we blogged as if we were using social media platforms like Twitter/X:

So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).

Now we — though maybe not so much myself, or the more #IndieWeb people reading this — use social media platforms, specifically Instagram, as if they were blogging platforms.

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blogs, history, self publishing

Closing down your website when you know the end is near

14 February 2025

David M. Webb, a retired investment banker based in Hong Kong, writes about closing his website, aptly named webb-site, which he launched in 1998, on account of terminal illness:

I hope to reach 60 in August and all I want for my birthday is another one, but before I become more dysfunctional, I need to make plans for the orderly conclusion of this pro bono, loss-making work rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family. One of the few benefits of knowing that you’re dying is being able to plan the end on your own terms.

Despite being online for about the same amount of time, I’d never heard of Webb, or his website, until I read his valedictory post yesterday. What a terrible time it must be though, for him, and his family, with his illness.

His post raises some soul searching matters though. I’ve not (really) given any thought to what happens to this website after I am gone. I did get as far as seeing if my web host offered advance paid long term hosting packages, so my website survives me for at least some period of time. This was after I saw some writing on the subject about eight or nine months ago maybe.

But I just picture myself keeping on keeping on here, and hope any preservation plans will be easy to implement when they become necessary. Webb says he does not intend that his website remain online after his death. This seems a shame, especially for one that’s been around for some twenty-seven years. Instead, Webb hopes his website, and work, will live on through the Internet Archive.

Maybe that will be the case for many website owners.

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blogs, trends

Group blogs as social network alternatives? A thought experiment

22 January 2025

The Verge recently published a list of social network alternatives for people disillusioned with the likes of X, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram, to consider moving to. Having built-up a network of acquaintances and followers on these channels though, I’m not sure how many people would really consider migrating. Starting over, persuading contacts to relocate, might be a step too far for some. Still, there’ll be people determined to leave certain social network platforms.

But where will they go?

The Verge list includes many of the usual suspects. Bluesky, Mastodon, Snapchat, and Discord. There’s also a few that are new to me: Spill, Trust Cafe, Spoutible, and CounterSocial. Tumblr is also suggested, and might be one of the easier-to-adopt options, as the experience is somewhat similar to that of a micro-blogging platform. But you’d still have your work cut out getting your followers to join you there. Reddit is also listed, but be aware, your content might be used to train AI bots.

Conspicuous through absence from the list though are blogs. But aren’t blogs only for one person, I hear you asking. What use then are blogs as an alternative sort of social network? While it’s true many blogs are maintained by one person, some blogging platforms, including WordPress (WP), allow individual blogs to have multiple users. These are group blogs. Someone sets themselves up as an administrator, and then invites acquaintances to join. Blog-based social networks would be similar.

Here, a member’s user page would serve as their profile page, where biographical information can be added. From there someone would be able to post content — blog posts — as if they were doing so on Facebook or Instagram. As far as I know, there’s no limit to how many users (being admins, editors, authors, or contributors) a WP blog can have. This WP Website Tools post suggests millions. I’m not sure a blog-based social network would have millions of users, but it could have a lot.

Such a setup would need to be hosted on a robust web server, capable of handling what might be heavy user traffic. This would entail cost, but if this were shared among members, it may not be onerous. It might be a small price to pay. Members of a blog-based (private) social network would no longer need to concern themselves with the whims, and rules and regulations, of a billionaire tech-bro. Nor would algorithms be a problem. Sure, it would be different. But it would be independent.

To be clear, this sort of idea is not going to be for everyone, in fact it’s not going to be for most people. Certainly not influencers (but you never know). And probably not anyone not comfortable with setting up a self-hosted blogging application (such as WP), on a web server. But on the plus side, members would be part of a social network they controlled under their own terms. These networks might need “community” guidelines of some sort, but I doubt these would need to be expansive.

Of course, anyone hoping to escape from the mainstream social networks, to a blog-based social network, would still have to convince their acquaintances to follow them over. There’s probably more questions than answers. There would be a learning curve for some people. So maybe we’re back to square one. And yes, this thought experiment of mine is WordPress-centric (since I use WP), but no doubt there are other blogging platforms with similar functionality. Still, this might be an option.

My blog is powered by my obsessions

18 January 2025

What makes for a good blog? Merlin Mann, writing in 2008, the golden age of blogging if ever there was one, has a few answers to the question:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

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blogs, IndieWeb

IndieWeb makes all of us property owners online

6 January 2025

American engineer and product manager Den Delimarsky offers another way of looking at the core IndieWeb tenets of owning your own website domain, and owning your own content. See yourself as a property owner, rather than a renter.

If any of your online presence is on social media channels, you’re leasing the space, you don’t own it. The property owner could give you your marching orders at any time.

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blogs, IndieWeb, trends

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