I have recently been thinking about what it means to have a presence online, and what (if anything) I want to do about it. Here are a few notes for my benefit, but I hope will help you think about this as well.
- In 2018 I deleted my Facebook account.
- In 2019 I stopped using Twitter, although towards the end of last year I did start reading it again to see if I was missing anything. I was not.
- I wrote two blog posts in 2019.
- As calm and peaceful as I now feel having got rid of Twitter and Facebook, I feel like I have given up any presence on the web.
- Recently I have been pining for Google Reader, and the community of bloggers that existed during the golden age of blogs. My guess is that this was 2005-2011, or something like that. I was more of a lurker than an active participant back then, but I do miss it.
- Is interaction with others something that I actually want? What about enabling comments? e.g. Twitter/Facebook have toxic people, and back in the day blog comments could be pretty tiresome as well.
- The Indieweb is really interesting.
- Initially blogs, or web-logs, were simply records of things authors found on the web.
- For years my blogging efforts have felt like shouting in to the wind. In my case no one is listening. But I am not sure that anyone needs to, blogging can be for the sole benefit of the writer.
- These days so many so-called blogs are closer to a magazine or news format. They contain in depth articles, most are written for commercial interests. Is it silly to make the distinction between web-logs, golden-era blogs, and modern commercial blogs?
- I like the idea of blogging planets, for blogs (a stupid name). They used to be great for discovering other dev blogs. Examples inlcude: Planet Python and Planet Ubuntu
- Blogrolls were great for discovering other blogs.
- I hate centralisation and silos like Medium and Facebook. Dev.to looks interesting though.
- I keep re-building my blog in different blogging engines and I cannot decide which I should stick with.
- My current blog theme needs a re-design.
For several years now I have been promising myself that this will be the year that I write more on my blog. I never do though and I am curious as to why this is. I might manage a few months of activity, but that is it. I think I might need to stop making promises, reserve some time for myself, and devise a process for content creation that works for me. I'll make no more promises though.
As well as thinking about content creation, I am becoming more convinced that I am consuming other people's blogs sub-optimally.
Since I don't have comments enabled on this blog, I have no way of getting to know who reads this. If you want to, do get in touch and say hello. Do not worry though, I will not want too much social interaction!
- Email: oliverlorton@gmail.com
- Twitter: @olorton
Finally, I am not the only one thinking about some of these things: