Blogging

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Blogger for 30 years

I’m a bit late to the party (here on this blog), but I just want to take a moment to congratulate @dave for the incredible milestone of blogging non-stop for the past 30 years! There are very few (if any!) bloggers who have been doing this for as long as that. Even the Wayback Machine doesn’t have records of those first years (as it was started in 1996 and Dave’s blog has been around from ‘94!) @kottke.org and @zeldman.com might come close!

So, congratulations are certainly in order! Hat tip to you, sir! 🥳

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Two blogs, two languages

In my endless quest of “trying out new blogging things”, I lured myself into a new experiment for this weekend: What if I keep my existing (in english) Micro.blog site where it is at micro.juhaliikala.com, but also start a Finnish variation of the site on a separate domain at juhaliikala.fi. Would that fly? In other words; will I end up writing on both sites for a longer run, or is one or other going to get buried as a failed experiment? Guess we’ll just have to try and see!

Anyway, both now use Hyde theme (or a variation of it), the other one runs on top of Micro.blog and Hugo (actually, the micro.blog version uses my own custom theme), the other’s build on top of Eleventy. If you’re ever curious to try the same, micro.blog’s variation of Hyde can be found here and the eleventy version can be found here.

The idea is not to publish the exact same content in both English and Finnish. Rather, I’ll probably end up writing “independently” on both blogs, depending on the topic and the gut feeling of where this particular post belongs.

Either way, it’s way overdue for me to actually start blogging in my native language. Let’s just do it. No more analysis paralysis on that then! 😁

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So, as we now have three main ways for subscribing to a blog/publication; email newsletter, RSS and ActivityPub (handle), which will win? Some blogs even add a fourth way: Subscribing via WhatsApp / Telegram / Etc. Will RSS and ActivityPub subscribing continue being marginal use case and email still rules? I have no idea, but I think about this a lot.

I feel ActivityPub (especially in it’s current form) has a bit similar problem that RSS does, non-techical users just don’t use them for subscribing. It’s been all about newsletters for so long, that not sure if that mental model will change easily.

As a blogger, do you intend to support several different ways of subscribing (to your blog)? Or, do you plan to just promote one primary way of subscribing and maybe offer the other ways of subscribing in “the fine details”?

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Does anyone run their micro.blog in some other language than English? I’m considering creating another micro.blog which I’d use for Finnish content specifically. There are cases where blogging in my native language would make sense (and sharing those post to social channels which I use in Finnish). Would be cool to hear some experiences if some of you’ve done something similar! :)

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After a brief sidetracking on WordPress, I switched my blogging efforts back to micro.blog. WP was fine (it always is), but the ease of publishing via micro.blog just felt like a better road to take right now. Let’s see how this goes! :)

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I’ve been mulling over the thought of building and selling a few website / blogging themes this year. Just not 100% decided on to which “platform”. Probably Ghost or Eleventy, or why not a micro.blog theme even? WordPress could be too, but the latest full site editing / block theme stuff feels like there’s too many moving parts to take into account. Would want to keep things as simple as possible.

Don’t recall if I’ve seen commercial Eleventy themes before though. So Ghost then.. perhaps? At least Ghost has a theme marketplace.

Just thinking out loud here I guess. Let’s see what I manage to cook up (if anything at all)! :)