Le blog de Zythom ferme, avec son joli palmarès derrière lui. C'est marquant de voir les blogs qu'on suit aussi citer le blog de Zythom.

Il m'aura appris des choses.

how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? I think I was approaching it from the wrong direction. Nobody sits down with thirty years’ worth of material ready to go. They just keep finding things interesting for thirty years.

Blogging for three decades requires to stay curious.

The comments live on a small Phoenix server I run, called Popsicle Boat. Each post has a companion thread there; publishing a post makes one API call that creates the thread and writes its URL into the post’s front matter. That URL is the only coupling between the two systems.

At build time, Hugo fetches each thread’s replies.json and renders the replies as plain HTML once per post per build, cached, capped indentation. If the server is unreachable, the build carries on and renders no comments. The comment system cannot break the blog.

The page is rebuilt every time a comment is added, but the cost is cheap.

A tutorial is available at https://www.popsicleboat.com/for-bloggers/api

most blogs that persist or accumulate value have a few things in common:

• they have a perspective, not just a topic
• they build
• they're written for someone specific
• they exist at a consistent address
• their authors accept that most posts won’t go viral, and that’s fine.

A way to start a website and connect it to the Fediverse and the ATmosphere

Micro.blog supports Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, Nostr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pixelfed, and Flickr.

Another service similar to bear.blog

[W]e will become deeply skeptical of one another’s realness. Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or TikTok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine? Is there a being on the other end of this web interface I can form a relationship with?

Ms. Appleton explains how we can use the limitations of language models to prove our humanity:

This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive. Language models can decently mimic this style of writing but most don’t without extensive prompt engineering. They stick to generics. They hedge. They leave out details. They have trouble maintaining a coherent sense of self over thousands of words.

Also human beings can vouch for other human beings using classic web methods such as blogrolls or webrings, or by linking to other interesting articles.

What blogging brings

The niche can be an advantage to get an audience. This is great to build a business, SEO traffic or monetize quickly.

However, if the primarily goal is to write a variety of interests, enjoy the creative process, or build a personal publication, a broader blog can be better.

It offers greater freedom and authenticity. Theses blogs existed long before SEO-driven emphasis. The readers often follow writers for their perspective and quality of writing. That's the difference with the mainstream content.

Writing About What You Are Interested in Writing (Or Reading) About

Jim Grey wrote in Blogging in the AI era, part 1: The acceidental contract

People like us who blog just write about things that interested us. Internet fame might be nice, but we’ve learned it’s elusive. We learn to be content that someone, someday, will find our work useful.

Blogging is not (only) a popularity goal stated by Jeff Starr's The Pros and Cons of Blogging:

[P]opularity is not synonymous with success. Blogs that are popular have managed to appeal to the mainstream mentality, but are far from successful on many other levels. Originality, sincerity, authenticity, and truthfulness are just a handful of the different measures of a blog’s success. You don’t have to be like everyone else — dare to be different.

One step further:

Chasing popularity instead of seeking to produce something of value that may be pleasant or useful to people who happen upon it is approaching blogging and internet writing through the lens of social media. More in Creators and More and More Content]

Ten tips for A Better Weblog from Rebecca Blood higlights the opposite of the mainstream social media:

Write about what you love. A weblog is the place for strong opinions, whether about politics, music, social issues, gardening, or your profession. The more engaged you are with your subject, the more interesting your writing will be.

Refuse trend-chasing webdesign: it was a carousel for Adële's All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot. Blogs doesn't have to. Prefer your digital home

I find again the same main ideas across blog posts:

• blogging helps clarify the thinking
• the writing is permanent
• you own it
• it improves the writing over time
• it can lead to unexpected opportunities
• it self-documentation
• it can be helpful to others
• the process is itself rewarding

Well it depends on many factors explained in the post.

For many blogs, meaningful traction often begins somewhere between thirty and one hundred high-quality articles.

The more important question is whether someone is willing to continue publishing long enough for results to appear.

A feedback from Robb Knight.

How he gets to write blog posts, the tech stack used for the blog, some blog recommendations, POSSE and more.

Just see or have access to the content.

Also

So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it.

Thoughts about writing and blogging. About the reader's time, writing audience, website performance, analytics, visitor respect, exclusion of third-party resources

We could consider the website "hospitality".

The best use for read-it-later tools for someone who relies primarily on feed subscriptions for reading is to perform the function that algorithms purport to perform for the majority. If you subscribe to interesting long-form articles, many of the articles that you read will have links. These links will either be to other pages on the article’s website or to articles from around the web discussed or cited to in the article.

In a post titled The Good Old Hyperlink, Kyle Labriola wrote “I like hyperlinks because it lets my personal writing feel like an evolving conversation.” Taking the point one step further, Matthias Ott wrote that the link is “the Web’s most fundamental building block, the thing that connects one human’s work to another’s.”

I also have something with hyperlinks. They are awesome to use, they feel great.

The bar is lower than common thought: uninteresting topics is a relative subject. The author's rule is anything that they’ve said more than once in a conversation.
There is also another effect in play: readers don't usually give this feedback, so it's hard to know.

So: lower your bar for what’s worth writing about! My personal standard is anything that I’ve said more than once in a conversation.

How?

1. Write consistently: every week and briefly, every day.
2. Notice and pay attention to feedback

Come with a good title: one that makes a promise about what the reader will get from reading the post that is (1) exciting, and (2) accurate.

Find the right framing. Provide examples. Use microhumor if you want to go for this tone. Write like you talk.

It completes my post "Where to find blogs to follow?".

1. Personal recommendations

2. Aggregations

   • Bear Blog Discover: https://bearblog.dev/discover/
   • Blogosphere: https://blogosphere.app/
   • Blogroll: https://blogroll.org/
   • Bubbles: https://bubbles.town/
   • Kagi Small Web: https://kagi.com/smallweb
   • PowRSS: https://powrss.com/

3. Social media

Many people on the fediverse have blogs and share common interests with hastags. Hashtags can be followed to get content by the way.

A microblog of notes, musings, WIPs, and TILs

That's minimalistic and practical

A way to start the day.