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I miss blogrolls
- newen 9y agoI agree with this so much. I miss reading thoughts by independent people on semi-esoteric things instead of filtered conversations on filtered topics had in vote-based sites like reddit, HN, and pretty much any other news aggregator. And I miss the blog rabbit hole you can go into. That was half the excitement of blogs.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoIt still exists (although reduced) but the trouble is breaking in. For economics my favorite is http://economistsview.typepad.com/ http://economistsview.typepad.com/ which has a huge blogroll, and those blogs, say http://crookedtimber.org/ http://crookedtimber.org/ have their own blogrolls and so on. What are some of your guys' favorites?
- newen 9y agoI used to read language log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) a lot. I get why they disabled comments for most of their posts but I kind of lost interest after they did that. I am not really sure but I feel like popularity of sites like reddit increased after a lot of blogs and news sites disabled comments.
- droopyEyelids 9y agoI like http://www.moonofalabama.org/ http://www.moonofalabama.org/ and https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
- biznickman 9y agoMore importantly is the death of two key resources: mybloglog & technorati which enabled bloggers to publicly keep track of trackbacks. I used it all the time and ended up with sizeable audiences!
- CodeCube 9y agoI don't know ... I feel like those aggregation sites ended up killing the golden goose. People stopped visiting individual sites (and adding them to their browser favorites) because they could just visit the aggregator, and eventually they became the primary destination ... so maintaining your own blog was merely a way to get onto the aggregator.
- lkrubner 9y agoTechnorati had terrible management. I was very frustrated trying to deal with them. In 2006 myself and friends were trying to build a startup that would rely heavily on Technorati's "Authority" ranking. Technorati supposedly had an API, but to use it we were supposed to write to the company and negotiate a price. I wrote to them 20 times. No one ever wrote back. Out of frustration, I tracked down some of the top people online, found other email addresses for them, and wrote to them. No one ever wrote me back. We were desperate to give them money, but they did not want our money.
- eitland 9y agoRelated: I've finally found a feedreader extension for Firefox that I like. I've started subscribing to rss feeds again and it feels great!
- sparky_z 9y agoI've been looking for a good rss reader. Which one did you find?
- rb808 9y agoI use digg reader which isnt fancy but works great for me.
- interfixus 9y agoCan't answer for parent, but I have settled for Feedbro, and it actually works really well. I have a couple of hundred feeds, OPML'ed across several readers over the years. Mercifully never the Google one, though.
- eitland 9y agoIt's the same I settled with. The only thing I can think of that I want and isn't included are: Auto sampling based on pages I visit (like old Google Desktop Search) and auto following (not sure exactly how) of issues etc that I interact with on github etc.
- kitsunesoba 9y agoThe best I’ve found for Apple platforms is News Explorer. It costs a little but works quite well and syncs read items between devices via iCloud so you aren’t shown old items when you switch devices.
- lowleveldesign 9y agoI am using reader on wordpress.com [0] - it works fine unless you need categories/folders for your seeds. [0] https://en.support.wordpress.com/reader/ https://en.support.wordpress.com/reader/
- melling 9y agoThe web is missing something between reddit and HN comments, and long form articles. It’s difficult to have a good discussion in the comments. And if you do, it’s quickly lost to time. For example, I can’t have a discussion about why I think the Amazon Alexa is “Making a Dent in the Universe” without being drowned out by the privacy debate, So, I started a blog where I can [attempt to] write my thoughts in a short piece. http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-universe/ http://h4labs.org/the-amazon-echo-made-a-dent-in-the-univers... My musings can go in place that I can revisit: http://h4labs.org/category/musings/ http://h4labs.org/category/musings/ I actually started a few years ago but I wanted off the ugly WordPress ads: https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyone-will-wear-a-smartwatch/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/in-the-future-everyo... [UPDATE] I just got downvoted because someone didn’t like what I said. Happens all the time. I’ve gone several levels deep explaining why I disagree with the common opinion. This brings up one of the other benefits of writing out your thoughts and opinions in a blog, you don’t have to waste FU karma trying to explain yourself.
- etchalon 9y agoI definitely miss running my blog. Might have to get back into it.
- CodeCube 9y agoGetting a lot of nostalgia as well ... for most people, social media has 100% replace the "need" for maintaining their own individual blog. They can post their thoughts to facebook well enough, and their friend list (when shared) essentially functions as their blogroll ... you can see who anyone follows on twitter, and (when allowed) on FB, so you can traipse through an interesting person's friend list and see what else you can find. That's in no way excusing the state of affairs. As I mentioned, I fully agree that _something_ has been lost since those halcyon days. The blogs that existed (there was definitely a higher barrier to entry than opening a social media account) each went their own individually quirky ways (at least, until the staggering conformity of everyone using blog engines like Wordpress (<3 ya WP, but you made the world bland)). It was great when a contributor had their own little corner, and would actively customize it (in much more interesting ways than the MySpace pages of yore).
- api 9y agoA major barrier is the hassle of maintaining and updating your own server, or alternately the restrictions and awful UX of most shared hosting. Shared hosting is generally overpriced too.
- conductr 9y agoBut I think that’s what made it better. Only people with something to say would jump through the hoops. Now anyone and everyone shares their opinions on everything and it’s just a ton of noise. I really think it’s ruining society in some way (social media)
- CodeCube 9y agoI'll suggest that there's a delicate dance to be had here ... you're right, anyone willing to go through setting up and managing their own server, will probably have "more to say", and dedicate more time and effort to doing so. It's not a bad thing that social media brings down the barriers to sharing your thoughts ... what's bad is how those same platforms have, over time, gone above and beyond in measures to keep you on their site and stop you from actually clicking on the link and visiting the other site
- simonw 9y agoI restarted my blog a few months ago after a seven year hiatus and I couldn't be happier about it: it's been incredibly rewarding. If you're thinking "maybe I should (re)start my blog" I strongly recommend doing it! https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/
- dqv 9y agoI really like your blog and I noticed you have the source code here - https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog But I noticed it doesn't have a license. Are you okay with people adopting the backend for their own blog?
- simonw 9y agoGood call, I'll add a license.
- jzawodn 9y agoI've been thinking of doing the same... Hi, Simon. :-)
- simonw 9y agoOh man, please do! I'd love to hear some of the things you've been up to at Craigslist
- fuzzygroup 9y agoWelcome back Simon. I am really, really glad to hear that you are blogging again. The internet as a whole lost something precious in the move to "social".
- shams93 9y agoNeocities has this kind of functionality. With a normal host you get 0 traffic, my coming soon prelaunch page for my podcast has gotten close to 10k hits through the neocities network with no cost or effort on my part.
- ar-jan 9y agoCombined with RSS/Atom feeds please. Many newer blogs just omit feeds, presumably because it's not included in whatever framework they're using.
- daw___ 9y agoPresumably because content consumed via a feed reader won't monetize.
- icebraining 9y agoNah, those use RSS but put just an excerpt of the post so that you're forced to visit their site.
- kbuchanan 9y agoIsn't this the nature of wanting to be special? If you fancy yourself Mr. Bespoke Blog Reader, than you gotta go look where others don't. This feels like one of the conflicting desires of the open web crowd: the view that decentralized content can exist without a cost.
- themodelplumber 9y agoThat's a good point. Habit probably gets in the way, too: Many of us have conditioned ourselves to continually check the same mainstream sources/walled gardens. These places have no blogrolls, of course. Thanks for your comment, it's good food for thought.
- pmlnr 9y agoCan someone justify me a blog that shows a blank page when JS is disabled with noscript (and, therefore, <noscript> tag is triggered, unlike with umatrix and ublock disabled scripts)?
- rayalez 9y agoServer-side rendering can be challenging to implement.
- pmlnr 9y agoI'm going to assume sarcasm here, given we're talking about content which is purely text, without interactive bits. EDIT especially after looking at the source: it's a CSS blanking to show signup for newsletters. Once the CSS is disabled, the text is there.
- pqs 9y agoI never stopped reading blogs using feedly. I don't like feedly a lot, but it works and it allows me to follow nice blogs, which, from my point of view, is a much better use of my time than using social networks, which I almost don't use anymore.
- vog 9y agoI'm using QuiteRSS, which is also not perfect, but I like it a lot. It's better than any browser extension or web service I tried.
- mroll 9y agoI've recently moved to this model too. I follow mailing lists and blog feeds via emacs gnus. I don't use fb or twitter bc I don't think the (content value)/(time) ratio is too low
- doctorRetro 9y agoMoved to Feedly from Google Reader (I miss Google Reader). But likewise, I get more value from that than social media. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the instant gratification of someone-liked-and-shared-my-post just as much as the next person, but if I'm going to learn anything over the course of the day, it's more likely to be in my Feedly time than Facebook time.
- panzagl 9y agoI miss webrings.
- bovermyer 9y agoIt looks like webring.org is still a thing, though it looks quite a lot like a sketchy landing page.
- jcadam 9y agoI keep thinking of starting a blog under a false name. My current blog: https://jamesadam.me https://jamesadam.me, is full of mostly vanilla tech articles, conveying nothing particularly unique in perspective nor noteworthy in content. I have ideas for more "interesting" articles I'd like to write (still mostly about software development, my industry, etc), but I fear they would either cause offense (and we all know there is no greater sin) or at the very least be off-putting to potential employers. Thus, I keep thinking about adopting a 'pen' name and throwing up a second blog to serve as an outlet for some of the more insane ramblings I'd like to inflict on the world.
- Filligree 9y agoSounds interesting. Please let us know when you've started it. :)
- icc97 9y agoI occasionally create random WordPress sites just to post stuff that's on my mind but which I don't want to openly admit.
- criddell 9y agoDoes it ever find an audience?
- throwawayeo5 9y agoI think that’s a good idea. :) I’ve considered doing the same thing, although I currently don’t even have a blog under my REAL name. It’s very easy to self-censor, especially if you’re not famous or powerful enough not to have to care.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoI've been thinking about reblogging articles on my blog. I want to set up separate article listings with and without reblogs, and separate RSS feeds. I wouldn't rehost the content, just put a link to the article in my feed.
- nathcd 9y agoI do exactly that with a /links.html page. Unfortunately it requires js because it's just pulling in my latest shares from Pinboard. (But the link to that page gets added to the navigation with js, so non-js user agents don't see the link to it.) Pinboard provides a RSS feed I can link to for my shares as well. I've been thinking about moving from Pinboard and setting something up myself and compiling it into my site's static html instead of syndicating from a third-party.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- coding123 9y agoI love the idea of more and more people trying to get away from platforms. But for the love of all things good, please: 1. Don't use wordpress, you'll catch a virus. 2. Don't use scroll-jackers, your OS/Browser combination should provide the best scrolling experience for your user, if you hate your own scroll experience, get a better browser/OS, don't FK with the one I have it's perfect. 3. Don't use pop-ups that cover content to sign up - EVERYONE I know immediately closes the page and never returns when that happens... it's kinda the opposite of what you want right?
- klez 9y agoAm I doing it right? No wordpress, no js (at all!), no popups, just (low quality) content. https://klezlab.it https://klezlab.it EDIT: damn, I just noticed the date on the most recent post. I should give the blog some more love...
- pmlnr 9y ago> 1. Don't use wordpress, you'll catch a virus. ?!? First, you're talking about a self installed wordpress, not wordpress.com. Second: just keep it updated.
- coding123 9y agoMaybe, but you're still using a platform, they'll pull your SEO towards them every way they can. I kept my wife's wordpress site updated all the time... when the virus hit it was a PAID FOR Theme that was targeted. Seriously the surface area of Wordpress self-install is crazy bad, not to mention many of the themes you select install scroll-jackers and email-signup cover the page crap that I'm talking about.
- Bensch 9y agoCuration for discovery has been the most difficult problem for information since access exploded with the internet. Netflix had prize money behind algorithmic improvement here. Public libraries and physical bookstores use experts and physical placement. Most digital content services use humans to curate new content. The last chapter in James Gleick's book "The Information" identifies this as the next problem in information - now that access is no longer a barrier, how do we decide what's useful? The combination of wikipedia and Google has largely solved search for most internet-available content, but not discovery or trust of what you don't yet know to search for. This curation problem isn't only about blog content - it also contributes to the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories. Comment curated by many people's networks has become limited to their tribal connections, and some tribes exclude information sources that value scientific or journalistic standards. What we already know about and read daily is what we trust, and helps define our tribe. Our tribe uses HN. Other tribes (which may intersect with ours) use Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, forums, newspapers, blogrolls, and many other systems. When we get content from our tribe - the concept of 'social media' - someone else is sharing their trust in content with us, in ways we can categorize. Each content system on the internet is rooted in a point source, the owner, who shares their trust with varying levels of directness: Newspapers don't have a pattern of trust sharing, though some experiment. Blogrolls' owners share trust directly - 'direct owner trust sharing'. Small forums (where content is only ranked by time, not votes) use 'direct user trust sharing' because users are treated equally; Reddit posts use 'indirect user trust sharing' through voting. Facebook and Twitter use both 'direct user trust sharing' (what your friends post) and 'indirect owner trust sharing', (the owner algorithms). It seems clear that there are serious manipulation problems with indirect trust sharing systems open across tribes - Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter all struggle with this. Innovation in social media seems to focus on curating direct user trust sharing to guide indirect user trust sharing. To fix trust sharing, we'll have to curate new direct relationships. I believe this will be much along the lines of blogrolls - direct trust sharing from identified tribal members, rather than only from your direct network. Work has been done to map the internet through linking. Some of this, such as Jonathan Albright's coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election, has begun to identify tribes in those maps. I believe the next major algorithmic innovation will triangulate your tribe, using content you've already trusted yourself (by sharing with others), and curate discovery of new tribal members based on the nodes in and near that tribe. A network-wide blogroll, across content types, which links you to new direct trust sharing relationships. This would help democratize curation, and could result in a clearer understanding of tribal boundaries and how disinformation spreads.
- gavanwoolery 9y agoI feel like there is a legitimate market for "the old ways" (TM). Social media is "great", in the same way that the invention of alcohol was "great" - the bad part of it is that it is literally designed to drive clicks and addict us, and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on (yes, I have seen all your handy scripts and tricks). You know what was awesome about walking into a brick and mortar building and buying a piece of software? It almost certainly would not contain a virus due to the prohibitive cost of getting it on a shelf, and it was not flogged to a state of near-death by app store restrictions. Yeah we killed some trees, and we liked it that way! (shakes fist at sky). Writing impressive code used to be a highly valued skill, limited to the few who put in the time to piecing together arcane knowledge. Now we are just surfing on the backs of giants and locked into their ecosystems. So long as you can write a laggy javascript app and google how to do something you are safe in this world. (shakes fist at sky again, why not) ...continues muttering/ranting...
- mroll 9y ago> ...and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on... i solved this problem by convincing myself that i don't actually want to turn it back on
- gavanwoolery 9y agoI tried this, but then my friends convinced me to keep it on. :/ May at some point turn it off regardless...
- lemonberry 9y agoI deleted all of my social media profiles, i.e., unfriended and unfollowed everyone and then deleted my account. It's been a huge plus for me. What I've done to replace it is email and call people. I'm 42 so many of my friends are receptive to calls that younger people may not be so ymmv. I'm sure you know this, but your true friends will be there offline whether you see them online or not. Good luck!
- icc97 9y agoThere's a nice post somewhere I read about good reasons for blog posts. Unfortuately searching for it gets buried in snake oil. The simplest point was if you've written a long email to someone explaining a tech topic - write it up as a blog post. But there were a couple of other equally valid reasons for writing a blog post, but I can't remember them now.
- jamietanna 9y agoI'm not sure if you're referring to Scott Hansleman's approach: > This stemmed from listening to a podcast on The Changelog about ‘Open Source at Microsoft, Inclusion, Diversity, and OSCON’ with Scott Hansleman. In the interview, Scott mentions how he receives questions via email fairly regularly. Interestingly, instead of replying to the email directly he instead writes a blog post and then replies to the email with a link to the post. Scott goes on to describe how he is constantly aware of the number of keypresses he has left in his life and therefore has taken the approach to not want to waste a single one of them. Extract from an article I wrote on the subject, under the term Blogumentation https://jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/ https://jvt.me/posts/2017/06/25/blogumentation/
- icc97 9y agoI'm not sure either, shows how shot my memory is. It sounds almost exactly like it though and I have read quite a bit of Hanselman's stuff. Bloody good find. Thank you :)
- icc97 9y agoI vouch to add a blogroll to my blog. I fully agree it's a great thing to do. edit: I've added three... https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/ https://ianchanning.wordpress.com/
- 0xCMP 9y agoI think the issue with blogs is things like Twitter solved: making it low effort to publish and promote content. I've recently thought that maybe a blog should really be a timeline (or similar) where you can tweet and posts simply exist as pages and show up on category/tag pages. You'd "tweet" your posts to a timeline and this would be what would normally appear on the home page and rss feed. You could re-promote an old post with a small blurb why it's relevant again. You could link to other sites with a blurb why. All the while you're not clogging up twitter and others since they can go to the website and see the information there (pull vs push).
- thanatropism 9y agoYou're describing Tumblr.
- 0xCMP 9y agoYea, pretty much. Except I'd like one that's open source and not maintained by them.
- lettergram 9y agoI actually touched on this in my recent article "Is Search Solved?": https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ Fact is, I'm fairly confident with the greater and greater pull of social media and walled gardens, indie writers are simply fading away. I know I stopped writing because it's hard as hell to both rank and share content.
- ibudiallo 9y agoI used to work very hard to produce low quality content and post it on hn twitter and whatnot. It was depressing to see very little traffic. So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it. What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed those to link back to me. Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not like it anyway. https://idiallo.com https://idiallo.com
- bowlich 9y agoThe fact that almost all the traffic to my personal blog are just one-hit wonders from google actually made me feel a lot less pressure to "grow" the blog or to even keep to any kind of coherent theme. These days, I post about whatever I feel like. With greatly varied degrees of quality. All knowing that a small handful of posts on some oddball niche will continue to garner tons of Google traffic while the vast majority of pages lay fallow.
- nercht12 9y agoditto. That's why on WP, I feel more connected. I get various followers and I can search WP for blogs I'm interested in, but that leaves out everyone not on WP. :(
- hphu 9y agoYes! I started writing about random experiences and thoughts at my blog: https://www.pixelsbetween.com https://www.pixelsbetween.com but since I decided to self-host instead of going with a specific platform, it feels like I'm on my own tiny island. I would love for a better way to share and find independent content like my own.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CM30 9y agoThey're still out there in some niches. For example, quite a few gaming sites still have affiliates, which are basically the fancy equivalent of a blogroll with site quality and traffic requirements attached to them. That said, they're certainly less common than they used to be, and that's something that's definitely annoyed me about the internet in recent years. Feels the culture of helping people out and working together to provide great content has been replaced with a 'me me me' type self centredness, where everyone only thinks about backlinks and personal social media popularity and anyone not in the 'in group' should be discarded whenever it gets convenient to do so.
- gt_ 9y agoThe music blog era was one of the greatest achievements of blogrolls. Music media was entirely subverted in favor of a litany of independent artists and it would have never been possible if it weren’t for the ‘friends’ or blog roll section in the margins of the blog pages. This author has a great point.
- ehnto 9y agoThis was what I enjoyed about svbtle when it was first kicking off. They may not have realised that's what they had done, but they had created a great aggregate of quality bloggers. Then they turned the public accounts on and the blog roll off and I can't even find the people I used to read when I try let alone have them in a handy list. And RSS feeds. Also, get off my lawn!
- spondyl 9y agoOh, congrats to the iwantmyname team for making HN :) I've been a customer for at least a year or more now and I can highly recommend them. They're a nice bunch and always happy to help out. I've even weirdly been enjoying and fully reading their newsletters which just started recently. I guess because they're written in such a conversational tone!
- chriswrites 9y agoThanks for reading the newsletter (Chris from iwantmyname here)! I dropped social media a few months back and started a similar family/friends newsletter... was hoping it’d work out for iwantmyname as well. It’s admittedly a little quirky, but I’m having a lot of fun writing it.
- anigbrowl 9y agoIs there an easy way to scrape blogrolls information/trackbacks or does it require buying a commercial scraper or rolling one's own in Python with BeautifulSoup or something? I'm very interested in mapping blogosphere network structures but don't want to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.
- themodelplumber 9y agoWow. I was seriously looking into web rings yesterday, just to see if there were any remaining leads to chase down there, with the exact same problem in mind. I gave up after a few frustrating minutes of finding not _just old_ content but _old and useless_ content at the top of the search results. It's one of those problems that, if solved, will add new growth potential to communications technology.