Blogging is where it's at, again

I don’t blog as much as I used to, or post about as wide an array of topics as I used to, but I’ve always believed the blog is the “natural form” of posting on the web: a site of your own, that you control^[1] and set your own rules on content and discussion; where you can post whatever you like without worrying about “The Algorithm”. Everyone should have a blog, whether it’s on a free service like Wordpress.com or Micro.blog, a crafted custom setup, or something in-between.

Blogs never really went away, but they did take a back seat to the social media era. I’ve been blogging on various iterations of my personal site (on different domains over the years) for around 24 years. This is my space on the internet (pun intended); I’m not beholden to the whims of social media platforms here, or their rise and fall. But still, I’ve spent more time and posted more on those platforms over the last several years than I have on my own site, so I’m not judging anyone about being, if we will, “social-first” (or only). For better or for worse, social media opened up the web to a lot more people for a number of reasons too long to get into here. I do like some social media platforms, some of the time. But deep down I feel having your own site is better. For the web, and for you: the writer and the reader.

Anyway. A couple of coincidental things happened over the last 2 days that got me jazzed for the future of blogging again. Maybe it’s going to make a comeback of sorts? That would be nice.

First, the Default Apps post from yesterday led me down a rabbit-hole. I was checking out the people who had also contributed to the list when I noticed the OPML file of everyone with an RSS feed. Currently that’s over 200 people. It might sound silly, but I’ve not seen a list of active bloggers that long in years, outside a few directories. It’s more than double the number of sites I had in my RSS reader’s “IndieWeb & Personal Blogs” folder after many years of slow curation.

Second, by way of Dave Winer, I found the RSS Club. Another list of bloggers — 32 this time — with the unique twist of committing to provide at lease some “RSS only” content^[2]. As the 2nd rule states: “Don’t Share on Social Media”. As luck would have it, the RSS Club also publishes an OPML file.

I keep mentioning OPML files. If you’re not aware, OPML files are used as a file for organising RSS feeds. If you export your subscriptions from a feed reader, what you’ll get is an OPML file ready to import into another service/app. So you could simply download the above linked files and import them directly into your feed reader of choice, subscribing you to everyone included when you initiated the download. The really cool thing about OPML files, that some feed readers and clients support, is that you can subscribe to the OPML file itself. This means that you’ll not only get the posts of anyone included when you subscribed, you’ll also get the posts of anyone who is added to the file at a later date. As the list of of feeds grows, so does the number of blogs and posts you’ll see.

Inoreader (one of the feed readers I’m a paid user of) supports OPML subscriptions^[3], so I added subscriptions to both of the files above. Already it’s given me a big change in my reading experience. Blogs aren’t being drowned out by news sites anymore. I woke up this morning to a couple of hundred posts to read on a very wide variety of topics; some serious, some whimsical, some somewhere in the middle. It was magical. It got me thinking about all sorts of possibilities around social media, blogs, and feeds — and inspired this post 😅

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but stumbling into such a trove of active blogs has enthused me about blogging as a medium again. It’s sparked a thought that through a combination of increased blogging activity, declining platforms, and increasing adoption of open standards to glue everything together, that maybe — just maybe — we can swing the web back towards the blog again.

Hosting terms and conditions notwithstanding ↩︎
This reminds me of the time I mused about setting up a site that was only an RSS feed. No web pages beyond the bare minimum needed for feed discovery, or maybe a splash to let people know what’s going on. The idea never came to anything, but maybe…? ↩︎
Feedbin, the other paid-for service I use, doesn’t support OPML subscriptions. I was able to import from the files just fine, it just means I won’t get any additional feeds. I’m still going back and forth over which service I prefer, but Inoreader now has a slight advantage. ↩︎