Here ya go, Brad.

[ergophobe]

That guy is a kindred spirit. We even read the same books. We both find audiobooks move too fast.

But above all, one of the things he calls out that I have long hated about the blogosphere is that since blogs became platforms for self-promotion, the standard advice was to find a niche and never stray from it. If you blog about HO model trains, you can get away with the occasional post on O scale, but do not think about blogging about anything that is full scale. Niche blogs have their place, of course. Just like Popular Science magazine cannot suddenly publish an issue about the fashion choices at the Oscars. But I would like to see more people writing more things that matter to them without thinking about whether it fits their niche.

Again, if you are not trying to get rich or be an influencer, it doesn't matter. This one of Seth Godin's broken record tracks - significant benefit from writing and putting it out in public accrues to the writer even if nobody else reads it.

[ergophobe]

In the article by Om Malik that Colin Walker links to, Om says

normals find our attention being colonized

I've been thinking of this a lot. My life now is calm in general. Capacious, to use a word I have never used before, but heard recently in an interview with poet Ocean Vuong. Great word.

Anyway, I have been thinking that I always think of being "occupied" as synonymous with "busy." "My mind is occupied" means "my mind is busy." It's churning. It's maybe stuck on a problem. I have a large mental To Do list.

Lately, though, I have been thinking of it in a more military sense where "occupied" is a synonym for conquered, colonized, under occupation by a hostile force, such as Elon Musk or Donald Trump or Will Smith or anyone else who leverages the open nature of modern media to try to colonize minds.

[Brad]

> niche

I'm always at war with myself between starting new niche blogs and just dumping everything into one.  Some bloggers treat their blog like a Commonplace book which I think is a good solution if one is not selling anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book

A really good example is Chris Aldrich's massive blog.

https://boffosocko.com

The search engines facilitate the online Commonplace book format with their page by page indexing whereas web directories have a hard time finding the right pigeonhole for them.

This is where RSS readers really come into play and it looks like RSS readers are making a comeback as a blogging alternative to social networks (although I still syndicate my blog posts out to Twitter, Mastodon and Micro.blog because it's free and a source of readers independent from search engines.)

[rcjordan]

An Argument for a Return to Web 1.0
https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb.html

^{Site design makes my eyes bleed.}

[Brad]

> bleed

Me too.

But that pretty well summarizes the old web arguments.  And notice it has the equivalent of a blogroll type link list with all those buttons (which I can't read) which help you to surf the web. The retro-web movement is a bit wary of reliance on search engines.  This group does surf the web.

[ergophobe]

Reminds me of the day in 1997 when I realized that I could write a little HTML and make a web page. And because I liked the idea, it had a faux-space/faux-star background with light text.

Some aspects of Web 1.0 are best relegated to the dustbin.

Hand coding is a dying art, but it's worthwhile to learn the ins and outs of coding a page and having the page come out exactly the way you want.

I remember a lot of WMW stalwarts insist (brag) about this as if there was some quasi-moral superiority to coding HTML pages one at a time. In my case, I really came to the web with a programming background and was motivated because I had an app that my team used and I wanted to be able to update it in real time without sending CDs or email attachments back and forth.

The idea of doing a repetitive task over and over that could be automated seemed completely daft to me and I never understood these people.

[Brad]

> hand coding

Yeah, no. Not for me.  I like scripts that automatically sort my navigation menus so give me something like Wordpress.  Although fashions that go through themes in the blog world annoy me to no end.  Like "hero picture headers" that take up everything above the fold or sidebar vs. no sidebar.  Gah!

For me the focus is on what you want to say.  But I will say that html pages without all the Javascript are durable and still renderable decades after they were published.

Still, it's nice webmasters have a choice to hand code while crawling on bare knees across broken glass, WYSIWYG editors, blog scripts or whatever.  Create, publish something, share, think, listen.

[rcjordan]

Blogless — Writing Articles online without a Blog
https://blogless.datenbrei.de/

[Brad]

> Blogless

Interesting but it seems like it makes you more dependent on third parties: FB, Twitter and Disqus.

I do know one person who blogs like this:

He either hand writes his blog post with a fountain pen in cursive on an index card or he types it on an index card with a manual typewriter.

He photographs the index card and uploads that to his photo blog on Micro.blog.

He seems happy.

[rcjordan]

Static HTML comments | Derek Sivers

https://sive.rs/shc

[rcjordan]

War Mapper | Global Conflict Tracking
https://warmapper.org/

[Brad]

Thanks for that. Very interesting.