Explaining Myself.
Web Publishing Has to Stay a Thing
07/26/2025
Desktop web publishing should continue to be a thing. But it can't just be the publishers making it one. It has to be web visitors too. And to make them we have to curate among those left who still remember what "web surfing" in the day, was.
There has to be an appeal among those who still use desktop and laptop PCs or any device where one can comfortably surf, to change how they think about the open web and how they visit websites. How do you get people to deliberately web surf in a world where they are now expected to "go to" not "hop to" digital places, much of which by the way exists in the form of apps.
Blog and link rolls would be one way, but since it would be easy to pollute any centralized web directory with spam and dangerous links, it would have to be extraordinarily well managed in order to be trusted.
Personally curated blog lists are out there though and are intimate to each curator, something the desktop web should be. I almost forgot about my own, but too, Suzy McHale's, or Ryan Barrett's, each of which I offer up as simple examples. The individuals behind these are not professional click-gatherers, they are authentic and use the web to reflect themselves, as the initial publishing homesteaders of the 90s did.
If there were just enough of "us" - me and the rando who still randomly landed here or jumped from their dwindling personal list of active personal blogs and what not - proving all of this was still a thing, the concept might catch a big second wave.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Noodling Over Blogging and the Original Blogging Platforms
05/31/2025
During blogging's heyday there were a lot of platforms that rose to make what was essentially just online publishing, easier. Really anything that could produce a web page could be used for blogging, but platforms designed for it included a workflow that directly supported quick article entry and instant ordering of presentation, among other mechanisms.
Examples of the mid-20s explicit blogging platforms were WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Livejournal.
I didn't prefer any of them at the time as I had evolved in web publishing using raw HTML, essentially Notepad, and an FTP client to update content to any given web host. I understood how easy it was to write in HTML not appreciating how daunting that was to average people.
Plus, to me, commercial blogging platforms were a sell out. It was obvious to me even then that producing content within someone else's framework gave those someones too much control. Not just over the content that one submitted but also over who might see it (or not). And, although it actually wasn't so horrible at first, they often included dropping ads around content which was a foreshadowing of today's internet enshitification.
And blogging platforms were to web publishing what AOL was to the early internet. They made web publishing too easy and people were quick to start blogs without paying attention to presentation or to any degree of customization. Blogs wound up looking all the same because by and large, people didn't put the extra effort into customizing or adding any "pizzaz" beyond the starting templates.
Truth be told in fact I didn't even like the concept of blogging let alone the platforms enabling it. Having a new word replacing the already perfectly good word of "publishing" allowed for the "containerization" of individual voices, a foil taken to a whole new level when people eventually left blogging en masse and actually and literally containerized themselves into MySpace or Facebook. A place where the magnificence of one's manifesto on the brilliance of communist ideology existed not as the full screen experience with all the open discoverability of a dozen impartial search engines drawing audiences right to it, but rather, just another string of text buried and blended with the insane screeds or mundane thoughts of a million others, just as The Man wants.
Again this was all to me at the time. I was a sneering digital snob.
Today I am surprised at my failure to recognize the bigger glory which was that such platforms were allowing more and more people to discover the publishing power of the World Wide Web at all. Today, I would recognize that better there should be a million poorly crafted and limping blogs than a world lacking the attention at all.
As with any mass population of "churn" exceptionalism is bound to rise. While many blogs were unimpressive and ill-tended over time, others rose from the background noise to become pretty big deals. The pure craft of blogging soon industrialized and from that, to this very day, it's almost impossible to research blogging as an expressive art because search results and the default mental orientation surrounding it all assume people are trying to do it for money. If you search for techniques on improving your blogging impact you're going to get a wall of hits that assume "impact" means "dollar making" and will counsel accordingly.
And, as I write this, AI is on the precipice of making human apes as the first stop for any creative or informative content obsolete. Future quests to improve blogging will boil down to the question of which AI products to use. An inevitable future that I prefer not to even think about.
One of those blogging platforms that people might have found themselves gravitating to was Blogger (now long owned by Google as BlogSpot). And within that still-active framework one can still in these 2020s find a few active gems of content that people are putting their energy into.
Check out Media Confidential for example. It's been doing its thing, clean and simply, since 2010. It is unapologetic about its web-favored blog form, correctly focusing on being consistent and interesting. It doesn't look horrible on a phone but it isn't pandering to mobile either. If you're reading it, it's because it's interesting stuff.
There are plenty of active blogs on this platform. Using this crafted Google search URL (a query that focuses on 2025 blogspot.com domain hits with only web results) you can immerse yourself. If you want to break free of the 2025 focus, just replace "2025" with a word reflecting something different and re-submit the query. You may not get active blogs but even the waltz through dead blogs may jar you into understanding what has been lost.
Spend an hour or two, preferably on a laptop or desktop computer, clicking around and getting that liberated feeling courtesy of the hold-outs. I hope it will inspire people to get back to personal web publishing (even if on a blogging platform) as much as I hope my own blog here does.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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