The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not. “Storing online data in perpetuity is not just about photos and texts but thoughts and ideas. Platforms such as WordPress are starting to act, but it must be at a realistic price.”
Search Engine Land: Study: Blogs appear most often in top Google positions. “Blog posts are the most prevalent content type in the top 10 positions of Google Search, excluding home pages, according to a study by enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge.”
The Verge: Substack’s redesign makes it feel like a more traditional social media app. “After a tease in a blog post on Tuesday, Substack officially shared details about its redesigned app on Wednesday, which offers a new ‘Home’ tab and some adjustments to the app’s current layout.”
Popular Science: Patch a potential privacy risk by deleting your ancient LiveJournal. “I looked into ways to back up LiveJournal posts. It wasn’t straightforward. At all. LiveJournal offers an official exporting tool, but it can only export one month’s worth of posts at a time, which is basically useless. I tried using Wget to scrape old entries, but this backfired hilariously: LiveJournal blocked my IP address. After a lot of research, I figured out that using WordPress is the best way to back up your old LiveJournal posts. Of course, if you have no interest in saving anything and just want to delete your LiveJournal account, you can skip straight to that section below.”
WordPress: Reblogging Gets a Refresh. “Reblogging is a way to show appreciation for another creator’s work while also providing your own audience with a valuable piece of news, work of art, or thought-provoking opinion. We recently made a few significant improvements to the experience of reblogging to make it more customizable for you while also ensuring the original creator gets the credit they deserve.”
Distant Librarian: ChatGPTLibrarian is still finding his (its?) voice. “One of my alerts just tripped over a new blog called ChatGPTLibrarian. The site was launched in March 2023 by librarian Victor Santiago, and I think he’s still trying to decide if he’s going to write as him, or as an AI-assisted author.”
WordPress Blog: Introducing the WordPress Developer Blog. “With much activity happening in the WordPress development space every day, keeping up-to-date with the latest updates can be challenging. The new WordPress Developer Blog is a developer-focused resource to help you stay on top of the latest software features, tutorials, and learning materials relevant to the open source project.”
WordPress: Say Hello to the New Jetpack Mobile App. “We know inspiration doesn’t wait for you to be sitting at your desk. It can strike anywhere. With the new Jetpack mobile app, you have the freedom to snap a photo to post while out on a walk, begin drafting your Bloganuary entry on your morning commute, or make tweaks to your content while on your lunch break. Inspiration, we’re ready for you!”
Popular Science: The best social media alternative is old-school blogging . “Private group chats in messaging apps have become a popular way to share photos and videos away from the glare of social media feeds. But if you still want some level of exposure, blogging is a way to get your thoughts, pictures, links, and other content out into the world. It goes back to an earlier, simpler time on the internet, and if that sounds appealing to you, this is how you post like in the good old days.”
Front Matter: Building an archive for scholarly blog posts. “Building an archive of scholarly blog posts faces the same fundamental challenges as repositories for other types of scholarly content, whether data, software, preprints, or journal articles. You have to collect metadata and content, and that approach only scales with standardization and open licenses. Luckily we already know a lot about required and optional but desired scholarly metadata, and they are fundamentally not different for scholarly blog post.”
The Verge: Bring back personal blogging. “If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?… The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it.”
Graham Macphee: Using Mastodon to power my blog comments. “Since my article earlier this year about integrating my blog’s comments with Twitter, I’ve now switched to power my blog comments with discussions happening on Mastodon.”
WordPress: Write and Publish Your Newsletter on WordPress.com. “We’re introducing WordPress.com Newsletter – with its own dedicated theme – to make it even easier to get up and running without going through the full website-building process. Newsletter gives you a place to write and build an audience, with the flexibility of WordPress under the hood to grow in many different directions.”
WordPress: Welcome Back, Bloganuary!. “Bloganuary is a month-long blogging challenge in January, where you’ll receive a daily writing prompt to inspire you to publish a post on your blog. You can respond to the prompts in any way you like: a story, a picture, a poem, a drawing, a recipe, or even a song. Anything goes!”
Spotted on Mastodon! The Ooh! Directory, at https://ooh.directory/. It’s a searchable subject index of blogs. From the About page: “ooh.directory is a place to find blogs that interest you. Explore the categories, search blog details, flip through random blogs, or keep visiting the most recently-updated blogs to see who’s talking about what right now.” Subject directories might be old fashioned but this one includes the blog’s most recent post (all included blogs must have an RSS feed) and each entry notes when the blog was last updated. There are 898 blogs at this writing. Great work.
