Blogging is Not Dead and the Sunrise

This morning, I walked out to water part of the garden and looked east—just as the sun was casting early light on the underside of the few clouds scattered across the sky. I had just grabbed my coffee and stepped outside when I thought, Wow, we haven’t had a colorful sunrise in a while. I should grab my camera.

I literally ran up the stairs, grabbed the camera, and rushed back outside—only to snap one shot before the color vanished.

That’s how it goes sometimes with sunrise light—there one moment, gone the next, fading into a gray, hazy mush of heat. The image I captured (at the top) barely reflects what I saw in person, but it’s the best I’ve got. Even my Z6III couldn’t handle the dynamic range; it was still nearly dark outside. My Zf has a bit more range, but I only had seconds to decide.

Blogging Still Survives

It got me thinking about the longevity of this thing we call blogging. And, actually, in contrast to the colors of the sunrise, the platform itself seems to have survived a lot of change in the Internet technology world. I haven't written about blogging (or technology) in a while, so you'll have to flow with the photography deviation today, or come back next time. I do have 4 categories that I stick to though, and technology is one of them.

This week, on some blog somewhere, I read about the Lindy Effect—the idea that the longer a technology survives, the longer it's likely to continue surviving. That principle rings especially true when it comes to blogging. I love that the blogging community is still alive and thriving 20–25 years after its heyday. It existed before social media, before YouTube took over the world, and before Google decided what people will and won’t see.

This summer, I’ve discovered more great blogs than ever before (see Summer Flowers and Finding Fascinating People, for example). So don’t let anyone tell you blogging is dead. Maybe it’s dead as a six-figure revenue stream—but if you can look past Google rankings and ad revenue, and instead find the people who don’t care about those things, it’s incredible. Blogging remains one of the last hidden gems of the Internet—hidden in plain sight.

Blogging is Not Dead

Google searches today might lead the uninitiated to believe that blogging is dead—but that’s mostly because Google now serves up “promoted” results first, followed by the top three traffic-heavy sites (usually Quora, Reddit, and YouTube). As a result, you have to dig a lot deeper and look in different places to find cool blog content—but it’s still out there, and in abundance.

The WordPress Reader is actually a great place to start. Most people probably don’t even realize it still exists, but it does—and it works surprisingly well. Their Discover section is designed specifically to “explore popular blogs that inspire, educate, and entertain,” and it does a decent job of that. Of course, it only showcases sites on the WordPress platform, but many of the blogs you’ll find there are ones you’d likely never see on the first page of Google results.

Blogs are Run by Real People

Blogs are an incredible resource created by regular people. Sure, there are spammy, bot-driven, SEO-laden advertising blogs out there—but I don’t even count those anymore. You do have to wade through more noise these days, and it’s definitely less convenient than watching an algorithm-fed video, but you can still learn a lot about a wide range of subjects from everyday, non-famous people.

I recently re-discovered a blog I used to read years ago when we were researching The Great Loop. She had just published a new post titled Getting Back to Writing, and in it, she reminded me that MarsEdit still exists for writing blog posts. I had completely forgotten about it—and it turned out to be exactly what I needed, an offsite editor that works like Obsidian, but for WordPress.

Redesign Inspires Writing

One of my biggest frustrations with blogging today is the cost—which can vary widely depending on the platform and features you choose. I’d love to try Ghost or some of the other options out there, but there’s only so much bandwidth-funding to go around, and I’ve already gone all in on Obsidian Publish as my content hub.

Yes, you can blog for free, but it’s not quite the same as it used to be, when you could just map a domain and be done with it. These days, we pay what we need to pay and use coupons when we can find them.

Yesterday, I finally got around to redesigning the last of our four main websites—Deborah’s site. Having a design you actually like makes a big difference in your motivation to keep using it. (That said, we only redesign our sites maybe once a year or less—it just takes too much time.)

At the beginning of the year, we decided to restructure our sites by subject. Now we have two personal blogs and two shared blogs—Shanty Travelers and Deborah’s Iris Garden. They share some design symmetry but differ in subject matter and color palettes.

Deborah has been hard at work writing all the blog posts for Shanty Travelers and DIG, so go show her blog some love—she’ll be posting new updates soon. And if you have a blog of your own leave a link in the comments so everyone can check it out!

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