I had a problem, this last Blaugust. There were so many blogs to read, but I’d have to hunt down a spreadsheet, or hope I saw them as they scrolled by on Mastodon or BlueSky, or scroll through the Blaugust Discord. When I did find them, I’d see that I’d missed double the number of posts as I’d read.
Everything scrolls away so quickly on social media. If you’re glued to the stream, if your phone is always in your hand, then maybe you’ll be able to keep up. Look away for a few hours and you’ll never catch up again. There’s no permanence. There’s no time to look around.
Blogs
The word “blog” is (or was) shorthand for “weblog”. Early web pioneers would manually update web pages with links to interesting stuff they found on the Internet — this was before search engines made it simple. Yahoo! was, back then, THE place to go if you wanted to find things on the web, and it was nothing more than links to websites sorted by category.
If your website wasn’t on Yahoo!, it was almost certain nobody was going to stumble upon your site. The boundless creativity of the terminally online came up with a bunch of solutions. Link aggregators like Digg, Fark, Slashdot; web rings; weblogs.
Someone would find something fun on the Internet, so they’d fire up Front Page or some text editor, craft some HTML, maybe add some thoughts about it or life in general, then use FTP to upload it to some web host where someone might find it, follow the link, and find something new.
I was around back then, somewhere between the discovery of fire and the follow-up of the wheel, when we had to blog by moving the bits around ourselves in little sledges (wheelbarrows having not yet been invented).
Penultimatum was my first or second blog (darfstellar being the other one, not sure in which order I made them). I believe I did most of the art myself; I think I stole the frog cartoon from somewhere. I know it was my one mission in my online life to get my blog indexed by Yahoo!. I’m not sure what I expected to happen if it did. Fame and fortune, probably. I had my head in the clouds a lot back then. But this was what you did, if you were web-capable back in the dawn of the public Internet — you made your own web page, you made your own blog, and then you tried to get people to read it. Since I was, at the time, minorly internet-known for the stuff I worked on at Apple and Sony, some people did, and I was happy.
The internet exploded in popularity, and people went everywhere. Forums built online communities around pretty much everything. Websites built their own communities. Blogs fell out of fashion; why read the thoughts of one person when you could join a community of hundreds? A list of curated links fell out of fashion.
So back to the topic of what I’ve done. With a little more history. I started my first Daily Blogroll on my blog West Karana back in November of 2007. Instead of writing a bunch of little blog posts about the discussions going on in the blog-o-sphere, I thought I could just put them all together in a single post and just say a sentence or two about all of them.
2007 had been a bad year for me. I’d lost my job in San Diego, was out of work for a couple of months, found a new job in Connecticut (a job I still have), moved cross country, my dad died, it was just a really bad year. I turned to the gaming community, and they responded when I needed them. Writing about what other people were writing about; being part of the conversation, part of that world, kept me going when I really had nobody else but my cat. (RIP Lannister).
I did the Daily Blogroll, on and off (never really was daily) for two years before it became overwhelming. What used to take a few minutes before work turned into something that would take hours, and so I slowed down and then stopped.
Problem was, I never really had the time to look at so many blogs each day. I tried Feedly, but then I’d get overwhelmed by the vast number of articles I’d have to catch up on each day. Too much stress, so, in the end, I’d just follow people on Twitter, or Google Plus, or Facebook up until the time they went Nazi, died, or stopped showing me content I cared about, respectively. It took until G+ died for me to come back to blogging (having by this time lost the westkarana.com domain), and for Blaugust to get me to do it with any sort of regularity.
Keeping up with other people’s blogs became a problem once again.
So I have done something about it.
That’ll be another post, but for now, at the top left of this very blog is a link for “Daily Blogroll”. I’d love it if you’d give it a click and then let me know if you liked what you found there.
Holy Cow! The first link I clicked was Jamie Zawinski’s blog and my eyes are still recovering. That thing needs a trigger warning for glare.
The Daily Blogroll looks beautiful, though. There always used to be someone who kept one of those on behalf of the blogosphere. I remember when it was you and then it was Liore for a while and after that I forget but there were a couple more. And then it kind of faded out. I always found it very useful but I sure wouldn’t want to be the person doing it. I try to include as many links to other blogs as I can in my posts but it’s a bit sporadic.
Of course, Blogger’s Blog Roll handles it automatically but it has no curation values. It’s just everything anyone I add to the list ever posts, in the order it gets posted. I read your very small print so I see the Daily Blogroll is also automated. Does it also show every post by everyone you add to the feed or are you picking them somehow? Also, can the Daily Blogroll itself be added to Feedly so we know when it updates without needing to click the link on Chasing Dings?
I’ll talk more about it when I write the follow-up post, but it basically looks at a list of RSS feeds I’ve collected, shuffles them up, and finds the first twelve stories from that list and processes them.
It’s quite possible that if someone posts more than one post a day, or even just every day, that I might miss one.
As for adding a RSS feed, yes, that is part of the plan 🙂
I have added a RSS feed –> https://westkarana.xyz/rss.xml
I find new blogs mainly from the comments of blogs that I follow. If someone says something particularly insightful I will click through their user name and more often than not it seems like they have some kind of blog. If I like what I find there, onto my blogroll it goes.
That is insanely ground floor, by the way. On your second blog in 1997!
My first blog I started around 2001/ 2002 as a kind of slice of life thing, but I lost interest in it pretty quickly. It turns out my life is nowhere near interesting enough to write about (though I did have one post about lightsaber spoons and Total cereal that turned out ok). That platform is also gone now, it was associated with some gaming news site but I am spacing on it.
I didn’t start a blog that I stuck with until 2008. I think you may have even been one of the first people to notice it, though I am a bit puzzled to this day as to how anyone ever found it. At one point I was “internet famous” enough for a few people I ran into in games to know about my blog. However, the danger of that ever happening is long past.
I will say that I was quite surprised at how quickly traffic started up when I pushed my DAoC Guides blog live in 2019. It can’t have all been bots because I got comments that helped me correct some small details. I would have thought starting a new blog in 2019 was only a step removed from scrawling notes on the wall of an abandoned Nazi bunker as far as likely eyeballs. However, that was the easiest way I could figure out to get Google to index my guides. I sure as heck wasn’t going to start a proper website!
PS: Correction, there are no comments at all from you from back when my blog was really active. I do vaguely recall having West Karana on my blogroll, which is likely why I hallucinated you may have stopped by early on.
Now I feel guilty 🙂 I know I was really active on blogs back then. It was a community!
DAoC in 2019 really is something. I spent a lot of time in that game — Go Black Oak! Nobody has done the three-way faction conflict better, though many have tried, not least of whom Mark Jacobs.
At least you got some recognition for your work. I’m always astonished at the folks who spend days, weeks, longer, writing games for GameFaqs, for which GF makes money and they get nothing for their work.
“let me know if you liked what you found there”
I found this blog from there, so yes!
Seriously though, I know I’ve already mentioned this in a better spot, but I really appreciate the daily blogroll. I’ve read and interact with more blogs this way than I have in quite some time, including Blaugust. I think it’s a good min/max so I don’t feel overwhelmed.
I had plans to have many, many more blogs per day, but then I remembered how much I got overwhelmed by Feedly and said, “Twelve. That’s enough for a day.”
I’m glad you like it!