Feeds and algorithms have freed us from personal websites

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Feeds and algorithms have freed us from personal websites

26 November 2025

For another point of view, sorry POV, which I suggest you should read in full, Germany based linguist and writer, Burk:

People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to “juliawrites.com” anymore. They go to TikTok. Or Substack. Or Medium. Or Twitter. Or anything that has a feed and an algorithm.

Well most people stopped, obviously. But I still sometimes type “juliawrites.com”. And “TikTok.com/@juliawrites”. Rather than using the TikTok app (yet to install it), so I can see the page of the person I want to, instead of the algorithm serving up what it decides to.

Ditto “Instagram.com”, where the website trumps the app when it comes to user experience any day. I see only what I want to see. And then leave. I seldom go to Substack. I do look in on Twitter sometimes, and Medium, where I have an (unused) account, and read Burk’s article.

I don’t hear too many people saying they like algorithms, at least in a web content context.

But this is the web, and if you want to write something like that on your website, your Substack and/or Medium page, or that algorithm infested swamp that is the socials, you’re free to do so.

As for “forcing” readers to learn the “design quirks” of your personal website, you could always encourage them to subscribe to the RSS feed instead (even if it’s an algorithm-free feed).

Via Michael Gale, whose personal website is here.

Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

22 November 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

Uni Watch, which has been online in one form or another since 1999, announced its closure a few weeks ago. At first it seemed the entire website, including archived content, was to be removed within days, but in a later post, founder Paul Lukas said the site’s future remained unclear. There’s a suggestion Uni Watch might continue publishing, though that is still far from certain.

The survival of niche interest websites and blogs, such as Uni Watch, are, in my opinion, vital for the future of the web, as I wrote the other day.

It is of course unreasonable to think every owner operated website, or those with a small team of writers, that began publishing decades ago, will keep going forever. What’s unfortunate is the format, niche/speciality blogging, seems to increasingly be regarded as passé.

Niche blogs are just too weird, their presence cannot be tolerated

22 November 2025

Megan Greenwell writing for Talking Points Memo, AKA TPM:

When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. On one level, that’s for the best; I can think of exactly one Deadspin employee in the site’s history who could accurately be categorized that way. But it also makes clear just how much private equity has taken from us: not just local newspapers providing invaluable information about communities, but also blogs willing to get weird, to try things no one else would.

Ah yes, make one publication profitable by shutting down competing outlets. But this is nothing new.

There were a number of blogs I followed back in the day, fifteen to twenty years ago, pretty much on account of their owners’ — how do I say? — colourful personalities. Many of them ended up being sold, and not long afterwards, ceasing publication.

Surely buyers cannot have gone into the transaction with their eyes closed.

The success of these blogs was, to a large degree, because of their quirkiness. Was the buyer certain they could replicate this ? It made a few people wonder. Back then of course a few blogs going offline was not a problem, plenty more were always coming along. Not so much today though.

Verify the age of adult websites users via their device operating system

22 November 2025

A provider of adult video content — I’ll refrain from naming them, in the hope of stopping network content filters getting upset — is suggesting the age of their audience be verified through the operating system (OS) of their device. Note: the link is to a blog post by the provider, not to any NSFW content. I can’t speak for what happens if you start clicking other links on the page though.

More of these laws are coming, and the safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. However, the best and most effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to identify users at the source: by their device, or account on the device, and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. This means users would only get verified once, through their operating system, not on each age-restricted site. This dramatically reduces privacy risks and creates a very simple process for regulators to enforce.

The idea certainly makes sense, and would save having to go through a separate age verification process on every website, social network, and other online service that requires it.

To date though I don’t recall ever supplying any of the OS’s I use with my date of birth, let alone verifying that information. It seems to me to make age verification possible this way might require some OS suppliers to make changes to allow this.

Update: on checking, I see my date of birth details are entered into my smartphone’s OS, iOS. I expect those details were verified when I obtained my first iPhone, as I needed to present photo identification on signing up with my then phone company.

Assume then my age is verified as far as my smartphone goes. As for my computer OS, Linux Mint, I’m pretty sure I didn’t supply any such info. Couldn’t even be certain I entered my full name. This I will need to check on.

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

20 November 2025

When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful.

In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people prepared to offer definitions of meaningful, and how to write accordingly. It was natural. The web was once awash with all sorts of blogs. Likewise people who wanted to show others how to blog “successfully”.

Again, the definition of successful resided with the individual, but it was obvious this involved monetary return for some people. And why not. If you’re going to invest time and energy in creating a resource that is useful to other people, why shouldn’t you earn money, make a living even, from it?

One of these people blogging about blogging was Melbourne based Australian writer and author Darren Rowse, who launched his blogging resource Problogger in 2004. Without going into detail, because you can look it up for yourself, Rowse, as one of the earlier bloggers about blogging, did, and still does presumably, rather well for himself.

Rowse’s writing, and that of his contributors, attracted numerous readers keen to learn what they could about blogging, and the potential to make money from it.

Problogger is what’s called a niche blog. As a blog about blogging, it has a reasonably singular focus. Some people considered this niche principle to be a core tenet of blogging. There was this idea, in the earlier days of blogging, which possibly still persists, that blogs would do better if they had a speciality. Not only were search engines said to be in favour the approach, but the author of a speciality, or niche blog, would generally be considered to be an expert, of some sort, in their field.

A master of one trade, rather than the proverbial jack of all trades.

Regardless, the world was once full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It was a great time to be alive. If you wanted to learn about something in particular, there was a blog for you. Some publications featured quality content, others required a little fact checking, while some were definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt.

But niche blogging was never a format that suited everyone. There are people who did, still do, well, writing about a range, sometimes a wide range, of topics. Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. Here, the publication itself is the speciality. To repeat what I wrote in the first sentence of this article: the rules of blogging are few.

But the facets of blogging covered at Problogger, and numerous other similar websites, usually only applied to blogs of a commercial nature. That’s not to say one or two personal bloggers might have looked at the tips posted there for increasing their audience, or improving their writing though. But in my view, personal bloggers were not, are not, part of Problogger’s target audience.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Problogger, let alone visited the website, maybe fifteen plus years, but a recent mention of it by Kev Quick, via ldstephens, caught my eye. But I don’t believe Rowse is being critical, in any way, of personal bloggers because they do not adhere to a niche or speciality publishing format. That’s not what Problogger, or Rowse, is about.

But this started me thinking, and writing another of my long posts.

In an age where social media, and influencers, have usurped blogs and their A-List authors, in the jostle for supremacy, it has to be wondered what role websites like Problogger still have. Only a handful of blogs generate liveable incomes today. Despite the doom and gloom though, the form has not completely died off. A backlash against social media, and a growing IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, has precipitated a revival in personal websites.

This is a largely non-commercial movement. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with personal websites. Many of us started out with them in the early days of the web. But the web was not only intended for personal journals. It was a vehicle for sharing all manner of information. The web could also empower individuals, and partnerships, to not only set up shop online, be that blogs, or quite literally shops, but potentially make a living at the same time.

But with the revival of personal blogs well underway, I think it’s time to bring niche blogs back into the fold. I’m talking about well written, quality, topic focused resources. This is material fast vanishing from the web, leaving ever diminishing options to source useful and accurate information. What are the alternatives? The misinformation morass that is social media? Being served AI generated summaries in response to search engine queries? A web choke full of AI slop?

At the same time, I’m not advocating for a return of niche blogs plastered with adverts, and popup boxes urging visitors to subscribe to say a newsletter, before they’ve even had a chance to blink at what they came to read.

I’m talking about work produced by independent writers, with an interest in their subject matter, who are not backed by large media organisations, or private equity. This is bringing back reliable sources of information, that also recompenses the content writers in some way. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons about monetisation since the earlier wave of niche blogging. We know it is possible to generate revenue without compromising the reader experience.

A resurgence in personal blogging is the first step in rebuilding a vibrant, thriving, web, or if you like, blogosphere. Now the focus needs to be on restoring the flow of accessible and trusted information.

ChatGPT to remove em-dashes from AI generated output if asked

17 November 2025

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, posting on X:

If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!

It finally does what it’s supposed to do.

Am I to think AI agents were not supposed to include em-dashes in their input (and here I go) — unless said use was grammatically correct — all along? Were agents initially supplied a list of punctuation marks and told they could be used as they saw fit?

In other words, quite indiscriminately?

How unfortunate to think poor training of agents in the correct use of em-dashes, and Oxford commas, has lead to the perception that any text containing them is AI generated.

Here’s hoping other AI companies follow ChatGPT’s lead, and the rest of us can resume using em-dashes, and other maligned punctuation marks, as intended.

‘AI Window’ lets Firefox users opt-in to Mozilla AI browser

15 November 2025

Elissa Welle, writing for The Verge, with some apparent clarification regarding Mozilla’s proposal to launch an AI browser:

AI Window will be one of three browsing experiences offered to Firefox users in addition to the private and classic windows.

Long time Firefox users were concerned Mozilla intended to turn the venerable (once venerable?) browser into a fully-powered AI app. It seems the browser manufacturer is attempting to assuage these fears by making it clear the AI Window feature will be opt-in, and the “classic”, AI free, version will continue to be available.

Meta to phase out Share to, Like on, Facebook social plugins

12 November 2025

Anna Washenko, writing for Engadget:

The company’s official line is that the plugins “reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved.” But Facebook also plays a much smaller role in the broader Meta business operation than it once did, and anecdotally, it’s less common to see sites running only integrations with a single social network.

Share to social media buttons were a feature on disassociated for a while, back in the day. It wasn’t easy to gauge exactly how many people used them, but I could see they didn’t go untouched.

I only deployed the Share option, rather than Like, as I thought the sharing of posts was of more value. I wasn’t a fan of the buttons that shipped with the plugin — way too much branding for my liking — and preferred to integrate icons I crafted myself, or, for a time, text only share links. I also had a share to (then) Twitter option.

While remnants of the early web continue to whittle away, the demise of the Facebook social plugins could hardly be seen as contributing to this “evolution” of the digital landscape. Thankfully.

Two numerals, six seven, are the dictonary.com word of 2025

11 November 2025

67 has been named word of the year by dictionary.com:

If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, you might be feeling a familiar vexation at the sight of these two formerly innocuous numerals. If you’re a member of Gen Alpha, however, maybe you’re smirking at the thought of adults once again struggling to make sense of your notoriously slippery slang. And if it’s a surprise to you that 67 (pronounced “six-seven”) is somehow newsworthy, don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means.

I’m all for it. I use the phrase constantly. I say six, seven, then pause. I resume by adding, eight, nine, ten. That way people think it’s an anger management technique.

Blogging and anger management goes hand-in-hand after all.

I would prefer it if 67 were styled six-seven though, so that it looks like an actual word. But then again I think presenting numerals as a word is part of the point of using the term in the first place.

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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.

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