Mitchell Report

blogging

I have been noticing a couple of disturbing trends this year outside of the AI/LLM bubble. Has anyone else noticed them?

First, domain registrars seem to be raising domain name prices like never before. Every couple of months, I get an email from Porkbun or Cloudflare saying that the registry controlling a domain's TLD is raising prices on such-and-such a date. I can't remember the last time I saw domain name prices decrease. They only seem to go up.

That is why I try to renew domains for more than one or two years whenever I can. If my budget allows, I will pay for all 10 years upfront rather than wait for the next price increase.

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Nobody clicks your share buttons By Derek Hanson

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A watercolor-style image of a cozy workspace featuring a desktop computer and a smartphone displaying the same webpage. The webpage shows a serene landscape with a person sitting on a rock overlooking a lake surrounded by mountains under a cloudy sky. Below the image on both screens are three blocks of text in muted colors and four circular social media icons in blue, green, red, and gray. The desk holds a white keyboard, a black and gold pen, a cup of coffee on a saucer, two closed books stacked, and a spiral notebook. To the right, a potted green plant sits near a window with soft natural light filtering through. In the background, a wooden shelf with books and a hanging plant is visible. The overall color palette is soft and earthy with warm browns, greens, and blues.


I saw this blog post on bubbles.town, and the title caught my attention, so I clicked through to read it. It was also timely because just a few days earlier I had added share buttons to my own site.

I don't know if I agree with the conclusion of the post. If share buttons are done tastefully, selectively, and with privacy in mind, I think they're perfectly okay.

We're seeing a trend toward making websites personal again, a little like they were in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social sharing buttons started becoming common as services like Twitter and Facebook (UGHHH!) grew in popularity. Email, of course, has always been around.

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Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net By Michael Harley

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I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀).

But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve titles and subjects. Even emails, although I don't like filling out the subject line most of the time.

He argues:

Use descriptive titles #

Please for the love of god, give me some idea what your blog post is about. I'm interested in a wide range of topics. So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far??? Especially on Bubbles, but maybe even on other blog aggregators, the title is the main signal so pause for a beat and try to come up with a decent title for your blog post.

— By Michael Harley · Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net

I think he's right about that. A title doesn't need to be clever or optimized for search engines. It just needs to give people some idea of what they're about to read.

But I have to disagree with his other point:

Avoid bucket posts

I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like.

I think these kinds of updates are totally acceptable, and I learn a lot by reading them. In fact, I am long overdue for a subscription update myself.

I have also been trying to do more of his next item: writing posts in reply to other people. Especially since I am using webmentions everywhere I can and self-hosting and publishing the replies myself.

In the end, I enjoy reading Michael's posts, and he usually, like Kev Quirk, gives me ideas about how to shape my blogs and my posting, and even how to practice replying to other blog posts.

So go check out Michael Harley and bubbles.town.

#blogging #opinion #writing

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The image features the word "Inkwell" written in elegant, black cursive script on a white background. The text is smooth and flowing, with the first letter "I" having a distinctive loop at the top. To the right of the word, replacing the dot over the final "l," is a detailed black ink pen nib illustration. The nib is angled slightly upward and to the right, showing fine lines and shading that give it a hand-drawn, sketch-like appearance. The overall style of the image is clean and artistic, combining calligraphy with a classic fountain pen element.

I found another independent blogging service in the same general vein as Micro.blog, Scribbles.page, Pika.page and Pagecord.com. It is called Inkwell.social.

Inkwell is inspired by the old LiveJournal. I never used LiveJournal myself, but I certainly heard of it. After looking around Inkwell, it feels very much in the spirit of the IndieWeb to me. It is open source, supports ActivityPub, lets you use your own domain, and gives you ways to export your writing.

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A watercolor painting of a middle-aged man with short brown hair and glasses, wearing a blue button-up shirt, sitting at a desk with a thoughtful, content expression. In front of him is a round birthday cake decorated with blue and gold icing, topped with star-shaped candles in gold and blue. The desk also holds a blue coffee mug and some papers. Behind the man is a computer monitor displaying a landscape painting with trees and a river. The background is festive with colorful balloons in gold, purple, and blue, as well as hanging triangular pennant banners and confetti scattered around, suggesting a birthday celebration. The setting appears to be a bright, cheerful room with natural light coming through a window.

Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy.

August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today.

But I started on Blogger before it was owned by Google on this date in 2001. Hard to believe it's been 25 years since I started blogging. Here is my first post ever. It's even harder to imagine I've been doing this for that long. I think blogging helps me get stuff off my chest, though very, very few people read it. I like to vent, review, or just get my thoughts down about different subjects. I like to think not only have my website and my blogging improved, but my knowledge has improved. Here's to 70 more years of blogging. I hope to be blogging and to have a website of some kind, no matter how they may change in the future. So Happy Blogiversary to me.



Related posts: 20 years

Links may be shortened via mtribe.link for cleaner formatting. All links redirect to their original destinations.

#blogging #personal

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Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately.

My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle.

Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to slow down and focus. On top of everything else, I have a backlog of podcasts to listen to or watch and a pile of unread items in my RSS reader. I'm slowly whittling the list down.

I'm trying a new program called Wispr Flow to compose this post and see how it works. I've always wondered if composing this way, using my voice, would be easier than typing and then refining. I'll give it a shot for a little while and see if it helps me focus. If it goes well, I might use it more for quick drafts.

#blogging #personal

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A black and white illustration depicts a man and a woman standing on either side of a round table with a large brain sculpture on it. The brain is split into two halves: the left half is composed of intricate circuits, wires, and electronic components, symbolizing logic and technology; the right half is made up of pixelated squares and contains various paintbrushes and an artist's palette, representing creativity and art. The woman on the left wears a fitted black dress, pearl necklace, and high heels, with her hand thoughtfully touching her chin. The man on the right is dressed in a suit and tie, also with a hand on his chin, appearing contemplative. A black cat sits near the man's feet. The setting is a mid-century modern room with a minimalist chair, a mobile hanging from the ceiling, a sideboard with a decorative sculpture, and a single overhead light illuminating the brain sculpture.

A thoughtful couple contemplates the evolving intersection of creativity and technology, symbolized by a brain merging artistic tools with digital circuitry under a spotlight.

I was browsing topics and titles on bubbles.town when I came across a post by Panagiotis Vryonis, AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more. It reminded me of another post I read a few months ago, On AI Images and Feature Images in General by Kev Quirk. I have been meaning to respond to his piece.

Last year, I wrote a post about using featured images called To Feature Image or Not. That post surprised me by getting a couple of responses. I usually get almost no feedback, so the email replies were unexpected.

The readers who responded basically said the same thing: It is your blog. You can use featured images if you want.

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https://elgan.com/why-you-should-love-blogs-now-more-than-ever

Why you should love blogs now more than ever

, Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan@mastodon.social) on sharkey (source)

I saw Mike's post in my timeline, and it's referenced above. While I know some people hate AI with a passion, I agree that AI content has, for the most part, made the internet harder to enjoy. I agree with his post wholeheartedly, and maybe it will bring blogs – and hearing from people on blogs – back into the spotlight.

There was a time when most blogs looked quaint and personal, reflecting the owner's personality not only in their words but in the site's visuals. I also agree with Dave Winer's views on blogs, though not the idea of leaving everything completely unedited. If by “unedited” he means honest, uncensored feelings, I'm fine with that. But I do think having an AI or another human proofread your work is usually a good idea.

When I read some of my earlier posts from my youth – about 35 years ago when I was in my mid-twenties – I often think, what did I even mean there? It may make no sense now, and when I see something like that I cringe and immediately do some blog gardening and fix it. I don't want an AI to turn everything into perfect polish, but I do want my writing to make sense. Sometimes I ramble and chase rabbits the way I do in conversation, and that can lose readers' attention. I hate walking away from someone and thinking, what were we even talking about? That was all over the place.

So yes blogs look like they are coming back and that is a good thing in my opinion, and Google if you are listening, Blogger will be 30 years old in a few years. How about doing some updates to it, but keep it conservative and non-AI related and keep the spirit of it alive and just bring it forward into the modern age.

#blogging #opinion

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