How many friends, family, co-workers, know about your blog/website?

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How many friends, family, co-workers, know about your blog/website?

2 May 2026

Half the web might know about your blog, but how many of your in-person acquaintances, people in your household, community, or workplace, know you blog?

Do you even tell them? Do you want to?

The question came up at Forking Mad this week, and started me thinking. When I uploaded the first version of disassociated in 1997, I told just about everyone I knew. At that point I aspired to be a web designer, so telling the whole world of my online presence made perfect sense. I ended up working in the industry for a few years, with a role coming about after a design studio in Sydney spotted my website, and contacted me.

Over time though disassociated became more blog than personal website/design portfolio. Having said that, I just about never posted screenshots or links to the work I did commercially, I was happy to let quirky old disassociated do the talking. But after a stint in web design, I decided it wasn’t for me. Somehow, building commercial websites just wasn’t as fun, or satisfying, as the personal work.

That’s when I started doing more writing. In 2007, after years of running this website with static HTML files, I migrated to WordPress (WP) — where, for better or worse — I remain. As a web publishing platform, WP works for me, does what I need, and that’s fine for me for now. I moved to a web publishing platform partly because I wanted to have a go at earning money as a blogger.

And in 2007 I wasn’t alone.

That ambition was achieved, though not quite in the way I envisaged, a story for another time maybe. But somehow moving to a web publishing platform brought disassociated into the limelight, even if I was an actor to the side, the far side, of the stage. Visits skyrocketed, and my in-box was full of messages from people interested to some degree in what I was doing.

At that time also I resided full-time in Sydney, and was often out and about meeting people. I would drag introvert me out to networking events, art show openings, and film screenings.

I had business cards featuring my URL, and handed them out indiscriminately. I most certainly told people about my website then, including family and friends. Once, more as fun, I made up, and printed out, flyers with my URL on tear-tabs, and posted them on noticeboards on the campus of a Sydney university. I wasn’t relying solely on online methods of blog promotion.

But blogging was an all encompassing passion and experience, and, back in those heady days, so much more than merely writing a few blog posts. The picture in 2026, however, couldn’t be any different. Blogs were pushed aside by social media, and the party was over. Actually, strike that. The party isn’t over, it’s just a lot smaller than it was before.

More to the point though, blogs are no longer the talking point they once were. Outside of Indie/SmallWeb circles at least.

When I talk to people I meet in-person and discussion turns to online presences, they expect me to share my social media handles. A blog, or personal website, sounds positively quaint. To the point I sometimes feel awkward even mentioning it. On the few occasions I might say, tell the barista at the cafe that I blog, I end up changing the subject, when I realise their eyes have glazed over.

It’s too bad, because the question has me yearning to supplement my part-time day job by reprising my role as CEO of the disassociated online one-person in-my-dreams publishing behemoth. Even if it is a website/blog, not a social media page. But if you have a website you want the world to know about, spreading the word to more of the people you know in-person is the go I think.

My website is ninety-two percent not ready for AI agents

20 April 2026

This is where we’re at now. Your website needs to be AI agent ready, or it presumably no longer makes the grade. I scored eight out one-hundred. Can I get a badge?

I’m not sure though disassociated is a website AI agents have any interest in anyway.

In any event, AI agent readiness is the new SEO. Since responses to search queries are AI summaries, your website likely no longer features in search engine results. And if it does, chances are no one will click through anyway. They’ll be content with the AI search summary.

But, you may be rewarded with a visitor or two, if an AI agent is able to use information you published, in response to a question (prompt) posed, provided the agent lists your website as a source. We should all be thanking our lucky stars.

I have all sorts of work to do, meanwhile, if I want my website to be AI agent ready. Work that I probably don’t have the time to do. For one, “support” here for Markdown is non-existent.

But, might a low AI agent ready score aid in keeping AI scrapers away? Somehow I doubt it. Even if a website is deemed “low quality” on account of its poor readiness score, I can’t see information hungry AI scrapers ignoring whatever content they can get their hands on.

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.

AI information summaries eating away at Wikipedia reader base

29 October 2025

Just about every online publisher has experienced a decline in the number of people reading articles and information published on their websites. Search engines presently do such a good job of breaking down the main points of news reports, blog posts, and the like, that seekers of information are seldom reading the material at its source.

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no exception, and falls in visitors stand to threaten what is surely an invaluable resource, along with others such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What happens if we follow this shift in the way people obtain information to its absurd, yet logical, conclusion? If websites such as Wikipedia, Britannica, along with news sites, and many, many, others, are forced to close because no one visits them anymore, what is going to feed the search engine AI summaries we’ve become accustomed to?

In short, we’re going to see AI summaries eat the web, and then eat themselves. The onus here is on search engines, AKA answer engines, and whatever other services generate AI summaries, to use them more selectively, and wean information seekers off them.

Is that something anyone can see happening? No, I didn’t think so.

Answer engines: a new challenge for content writers, bloggers

25 September 2025

Press Gazette:

The biggest year-on-year declines were at Forbes (down 53% to 85.5 million visits — the steepest decline year on year for the second month in a row), Huffington Post (down 45% to 41.3 million), Business Insider (down 44% to 66.6 million), and News 18 (down 42% to 146.3 million). The Independent, CBC and Washington Post also closely followed with drops of 41% in year on year site visits.

Nearly all of the world’s top fifty English language websites have experienced declines in traffic, to greater or lesser degrees, in the last twelve months. Only one has bucked the trend, Substack, but I’m not sure that’s good news. But the reason for the sometimes sharp falls in visitors? AI overviews generated by many of the search engines, that’s what.

People searching for information online are increasingly satisfied with the AI generated summaries, that appear, as the first “result”, in response to a question they have. These overviews are created by drawing on webpages carrying relevant information, and spare search engines users from the need to visit said webpages.

It’s great for those looking for a quick answer to a query, provided of course the overview is accurate. It’s not so good for the people who wrote articles, or blog posts, that feed the AI generated overviews, as they no longer see a visit to their website. But this is the future of online search. Instead of search engines though, we will be using answer engines to source information.

In short, answer engines results will be similar to the AI overviews we see at present. Everything a searcher needs to know will be displayed in the result. There will be no need to visit individual webpages again.

From a content writer’s perspective, it can only be hoped answer engines will cite the sources used to concoct their response to a query. This for however many people who might still wish to verify the information provided by the answer engine, that is.

But not everyone writes content to be indexed by a search engine, and many actively prevent their websites from being looked at by the search engines. I get the feeling this may not be the case for answer engines though. Writers and bloggers are all too aware of AI scraper bots marauding their content, whether they like it or not, to train AI agents.

But going forward, this might be something content writers have to expect, accept even, it they want their work to be recognised. We can all see where this is going. The end of SEO, and the advent of — I don’t know — AEO, being Answer Engine Optimisation. Those wanting their content to be found by the answer engines are going to need to figure out how to optimise it thusly.

No doubt help will at be hand though. AEO experts and gurus will surely be among us soon, if they are not already. But that’s enough good news from me for one day.

Subscribe Openly, and (almost) one-click RSS feed subscriptions

23 September 2025

In an ideal world subscribing to a website/blog’s RSS feed should be as simple as following a page on the socials. Simply click the follow button, and that’s it. In the case of, say, Instagram all future posts of whoever you started following will be visible — algorithms permitting — in the main/home feed.

Of course, subscribing to a RSS feed isn’t difficult. If you know what you’re doing. But to those to don’t know much about RSS, clicking the subscribe button might result in confusion and frustration, and see them abandoning the process all together.

Sometimes clicking the subscribe button might only open the URL of the RSS feed, leaving a budding subscriber wondering what to do next. “Am I meant to bookmark this link?” they might wonder.

But before we ask people to subscribe to a RSS feed, we need them to understand they first need a RSS reader. A RSS reader is an app that allows people to subscribe to, and read, RSS feeds. But to the uninitiated, the process of installing a RSS reader might present another confusing hurdle, only further complicating matters.

Subscribe Openly, however, created by James, is a step in the right direction.

Instead of presenting a would-be RSS subscriber with a screen filled with the raw data of a RSS feed, when they click on the subscribe button, they are presented with a list of RSS readers they can install. Here’s what you’d see if you were subscribing to the RSS feed for my website this way.

Next it needs to be made understood to prospective RSS subscribers that setting up a reader app is not that difficult. They doubtless have numerous apps on their device already, a RSS reader would simply be just another app they need to install. Let’s get to it.

Perhaps though styling feeds so they’re coherent in a web browser is something publishers who syndicate content to RSS should consider. Having a RSS feed that renders like a webpage — that could be bookmarked like any other website — does of course seem like it defeats the purpose of having a RSS feed.

But, if people new to RSS see a coherent looking webpage when clicking the URL of a RSS feed, they might have more incentive to find out more about RSS.

Bloggers might have been syndicating content with ICE not RSS

11 September 2025

Ryan Farley, writing at Buttondown:

Not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS’s competing standards (Atom vs RSS 2.0) that they barely registered the rise and fall of the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names.

Here’s a slice of web history I was unaware of until now: an alternative blog content syndication specification that was — for a short time — in competition with RSS.

That Microsoft, as one of the backers of Information and Content Exchange (ICE) syndication, quietly began using RSS, says a lot. A lot about RSS, and Microsoft.

12 foot ladder, a website that circumvented paywalls, taken offline

19 July 2025

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge:

The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has “successfully secured” the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online.

Thomas Millar, the 12 Foot Ladder founder, saw his app as a way of “cleaning” web pages, by disabling scripts that blocked access to non-paying subscribers. The News/Media Alliance, on the other hand, viewed 12 Foot as an illegal tool, that deprived publishers and writers of subscription income.

After 25 years we still don’t know what the web is, what it could be

18 April 2025

Here’s some web history trivia for you: it’s been twenty-five years since A Dao of Web Design was published at A List Apart (ALA). Written by Australian product developer, and Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp, the article explored how the web, still seen then as an online variation of print, could find its own path, and evolve into something entirely different.

Reflecting on his ALA article earlier this week, John made the following comment:

The Web is its own thing — but we’ve still yet to really discover what that is. Don’t ask me, I don’t know what that is either. But a quarter of a century on I’m still just as interested in discovering what that is.

I think what we can say now though, is the web is no longer a child of print.

For additional historical trivia, see this article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, about John and Westciv, a company he established with Maxine Sherrin. Westciv developed tools to assist web designers create compliant CSS, and web pages.

That was twenty-years ago — yes, mind blown — and was one of several articles I wrote for print publications, before becoming more focused on writing online. And while talking of ALA, it sadly appears only to be publishing sporadically nowadays.

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.

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