This was the first time in several years that I completed 31 posts in 31 days. That’s partially or maybe entirely to do with honoring Belghast’s memory. It was his “Blapril” in the early days of the pandemic that got me back into blogging; he followed that up with “Blaugust” in August and I have been blogging ever since.
I know why I stopped blogging in 2016 — it was because I thought (wrongly) that Google Plus would make blogging obsolete. Long form posts, an innovative publication strategy, the newspaper-style discovery that I really enjoyed, seemed perfect.
G+ became a running joke, and like all Google projects that aren’t search, was summarily abandoned. After G+, I went back to Twitter, and, well, guess what happened there.
This ties back into this past Blaugust, which brought me the first mention of the IndieWeb that I can remember. Owning your own website, and your content, becoming immune to the whims of the billionaires who decide what you can write about and what you cannot, and whatever you write, they own and can monetize to their own benefit and, importantly, not yours.
I didn’t do any of the group projects this year. I’ve done them in the past, and if you want to read my introductions or what I think about developers or whatever, you can find them in my archives.
I noticed that one particular milestone was to guest on someone else’s blog. I’d have done it, if offered, but no one did and I did not ask anyone else to do so. But, there was some discussion about making a group blog that received such wild pushback that it’s super clear that we Blaugust bloggers are a fiercely independent bunch, and we’re not giving our precious content away for free! Except on our own sites.
So yeah, we’re IndieWeb even if we don’t care to join the official IndieWeb website.
I was really helped along this year by EverQuest Legends being released at the beginning of the month. If I ever felt lazy and couldn’t think of anything better to write, there was always a new EQL adventure waiting in the wings, just dying to be told. This was a bit of a problem, really, since I essentially stopped playing any other games. After 27 years, it’s still as addictive as ever.
In 2025, I resurrected the West Karana name, if not the URL, in a WordPress-hosted blog. Since I wrote about gaming in this blog, I thought I could just write about anything else I wanted to write about in that one. Nine of the Blaugust posts came from that one, including a few from my long-running movie review series, “Movies Without Chris Pratt”.
What’s wrong with Chris Pratt? Absolutely nothing. I’m just saving up content for a follow-up series, “Movies With Chris Pratt”. My partner, Kasul, asked if there were any movies without Chris Pratt in them, and I said that I considered it my mission to hunt those rare movies down.
The whole IndieWeb thing got me interested in my project to move Chasing Dings! and its content to a static Hugo site. I’ve moved the workflow from WSL to native Windows, which took longer than I expected. I still have to work on a “related posts” component, and port all the existing comments into Disqus, and recategorize 25 years of posts into a small number of categories, and settle upon a post creator/editor, etc. By next year, I expect to have finished that and be off of BlueHost. The new blog is currently hosted on Github Pages, same as the Daily Blogroll, but before it goes live, I’ll probably find another host. Since my blog does not get much traffic, it might be economical to put it on AWS, but we’ll see. Having to do daily authentication is annoying.
I wrote the Daily Blogroll after Blaugust last year in order to manage the flood of blog posts. Readership has never been more than a dozen people, and I think most of the clicks through to the blogs I feature have been mine. So at the one year anniversary of the Daily Blogroll, September 25th, I’ll stop spamming Mastodon and BlueSky with it each morning and start trimming down the blogs featured to the ones I find most interesting to me. I do have plans for how to make a new one that would be customizable by the reader and provide AI summarization and categorization that would set it apart from other feed readers, but I don’t have a timeline for that. I’ll have to really think about how that would work.
I’ve found a lot of wonderful bloggers this year whose work I hadn’t been reading, and I’m happy about that. New friends and new viewpoints are what Blaugust is all about.
I think Belghast would be happy about his Blaugust legacy.
Ahh yes. I remember when you transitioned to G+. Strange days! I’m glad West Karana is back. It was my favorite game blog back in the day. Your comics were legendary.