Thinking of doing something truly perverted this year, writing some blog posts.
People have been pretty receptive of some of my words in the last month and posting mastodon threads is not the most accessible way to read content.
Substantially more grotesque: I’m not going to redesign my website and architect an entirely new blog. I’m just going to use… my existing website. 🤢
I’m not sure anyone truly engages with blogs though. They may skim something they’re linked to on here, but I don’t know if people actually follow along with someone’s regular musings.
@james count me in as a person who reads blogs. I sorted out an RSS reader last year after a long hiatus caused by Google Reader dying.
@james idk about regular musings in the life/opinion sense, but I've found that my technical pieces tend to result in quite a few people reaching out to ask questions, which is always nice and also implies that folks are reading the content instead of skimming.
@james I think those days are behind us, and I largely think the downfall of RSS is to blame. Sadface.
@james it’s a thing! I have dozens of personal blogs I’m subscribed to. I post to @icanthascheezburger regularly and it feels like crickets but also I occasionally will get a comment that’s like “I’m so glad you posted this; I was having this issue with my computer and thought I was going crazy” and that makes it feel worthwhile.
I don’t care if people read it; I think it’s healthy for me to keep practicing my craft.
If you’ve got an RSS feed I’ll subscribe!
@gsuberland I’ll be doing my content “reach” a disservice as I will be streaming to do both personal opinion AND code shit
@james I certainly also read others' blog posts thoroughly when the topic is interesting to me.
@james honestly I'm not sure that mixed content harms reach. the majority of traffic I see comes from off-site, and (with one exception for a series of posts I wrote about capacitors) only a few percent of my blog views come from people reading one article and then clicking through to another, and those that do seem to be selective/consistent about which post topics they click through to anyway. there are a few regular readers with notifs enabled but they're a small minority.
@james I don't obsessively monitor this stuff, so maybe there's more binge reading than I've seen, but it's wordpress so they show me analytics every time I open the admin panel to edit or write a post.
@james incidentally, your blog doesn’t have an RSS feed. Is the source available somewhere, I’ll add one if so because I’d like to read and know I’ll miss the posts without a feed.
@jon it should do! I built it myself some time ago. I’ll have to look into that if I revive it
Ah I probably need to link the rss url in my sites header so feed readers can discover it. Oopsie
@james ahh yes, I did just through the URL into my reader which does discovery. The RSS feed only appears to have the first post in it at the moment.
@jon 😭😭😭😭
Okay, I will definitely look into this… eventually… at some point in the future….
Certainly if I do actually write some posts I’ll make sure that’s fixed first.
Thank you!
@james ❤️ computers suck, sorry for pointing out another way in which that’s the case!