Blogging

Blogging. It was a huge part of my life almost two decades ago during grad school and kept me sane through law school, but then all of that sort of fell by the wayside as I started working and suddenly had very little free time, not to mention the fact that I suddenly had to be much more careful saying anything about how I spent the bulk of my time and mental energy. At the same time, blogging sort of got swallowed up by the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the cell phone era of apps for everything diverting the energy and creative output of bloggers into those platforms and silos. It kind of started to seem like personal blogs were going to be one of those internet things like MySpace or LiveJournal that were big for a while, but then just faded into the Internet Archive.

But now…

I would like to think there is energy in this space again, possibility. The idea started to take shape a few weeks ago when Daring Fireball linked to the [ooh! Directory](https://ooh.directory), a new directory of blogs. A new directory of blogs? What? Really? And I started thinking… Could it be time? 

It’s been so long, though; so long that I couldn’t even remember how to log in to the imbroglio. You certainly can’t call yourself a blogger if you can’t even log in to your blog, now can you? But while 20 years ago there were probably thousands of people who would have claimed to be bloggers, how many people now would claim that title? Times have changed so much that it’s a little hard to see how blogs can survive today. Back then, when everyone was posting regularly on their own sites, the currency was links. You link to me, see the link and the traffic, I read your site and link to you, someone else sees that and links to us both, and so on, so that every little site could hope to attract a few readers and partiicpate in a conversation with other people who were interested in similar things. 

Is that happening now? Could it happen again? 

I have no idea. Nearly all of the blogs I once followed are either dormant and have been for years (often a decade or more), or they are simply dead links. Yet blogging continues, and has been happening all these years, with OGs like Dave Winer at Scripting News, and Kottke and Daring Fireball itself, writing and posting and linking, again and again and again. Those well-known sites write to massive audiences, but they still inspire and foster the indpendent, can-do spirit that has always been at the heart of blogging. Just yesterday Winer linked to Tantek Çelik’s argument for what is essentially blogging — posting your own content on your own site in your own way. Çelik calls it the “#IndieWeb” while Winer just wants to call it the Web, but either way, it amounts to the same thing —there really is nothing like the freedom and fun and potential that comes from creating and building and maintaining your own home on the internet. It’s fun, there’s a good argument that it’s important, and there really is nothing like it. 

All of which is to say, I may be a weasel overcome with dinge, but… Hello world. 

Do blogrolls even exist anymore? Are they a thing? I remember the day there was this awesome new blog toy called blogrolling.com. It was this cool site where you could collect links that you wanted to include on your blog and then you put a little code into your blog’s sidebar and, voila! Instant blogroll! I loved it. That was the kind of geek I was back in… 2003? But time is accelerated on the internet. Blogs were a new thing then and now they are old things that no one has or maintains anymore. They have been taken over by corporations and talking heads. Maybe it’s not just blogrolls that have gone extinct, but blogs themselves. Is anyone out there?

But, yes, of course there are blogs out there, as the blogroll, or link list, in the sidebar of this blog here will attest. Some of the links there are dead, or lead to places that have grown dusty and disused. Some of those links (ok, most of them) I haven’t even visited in years. But it’s fun to revisit old haunts, to see what’s still out there, alive and kicking, and what has gone dormant or slipped away into the internet aether. Hello, Blonde Justice, so nice to see you again, or still — since 2004!?! I am amazed and impressed. In awe, really. Also, not only is she still there, but still hitting it out of the park with great posts that capture what it means to be a public defender. And Skelly So great.

I look forward to going through the blogroll again, saying hello to old friends, getting reacquainted, finding new links, and to letting you know what I find.

The poor imbroglio has been all screwed up visually, and pretty much dead content-wise, for too long. Changes are coming. No promises, but just saying.

One reason I rarely post here anymore is b/c the design does not reflect what I’d really like to do with this page. I’d really like to make some minor changes, and maybe over a longer term redesign the whole thing, but I never seem to find the time. Plus, I don’t really remember what I was thinking when I put this together. I made few notes to myself about how all the pieces fit together so now if I start digging around under the hood it’s like starting from zero. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.

Or not.

I know it doesn’t seem to readers of this blog as if anything is happening here. If you subscribe to the RSS feed you’ve gotten a few twitter updates recently, but that’s about it. The truth is, I’m kind of busy, but I’ve also been thinking about what to do w/the site. My initial thought was that I’d make the whole thing into a tumblelog, a single stream of pretty much everything I stumble across in my my web travels that seems interesting, funny, or otherwise worth sharing. For some, that would be fine — you’d be happy to skim through the twitter updates, the links to random articles, the quotes, whatever, and just pay attention to whatever you find interesting. I’m sure others would find that annoying — the signal-to-noise ratio would be too high.

The solution I’m considering at the moment would be to promote two feeds — one would be for substantive content and would be updated relatively infrequently, while the other would be more stream-of-consciousness and random. You could subscribe or pay attention to either, both, or neither. Thoughts? Suggestions?

A few resources that might be helpful in this project (mostly for my own benefit):
DIY WordPress Tumblog
WordPress plugins for tumbling
T1, a WP Tumbletheme
Tumble-hybrid Deuce theme