Do people blog anymore?

Do people do traditional blogging anymore?

Not the modern kind with popup ads and join my mailing list and affiliate links, and top 5 things you need to know before your clean your belly button lint.

But honest writing blogs about what they are doing in their lives and sharing things they find nifty?  Maybe with one or two discrete adverts to help pay the server bills.  

I have a very old blog.  I actually started blogging in the 1990s but that platform died and I switched to blogger in 2004/5.  It was a journal of what I wanted to share with the world.  Mostly it was a monologue, but then people started reading.  

And then one day a stranger on the street recognized a sweater I knit and said they were a fan.  Weird.

And then, if I didn't blog by 9 am every day, strangers would phone me up and ask if I was okay and did I need anything because they are waiting for my blog.

I stopped blogging for a long time after a few weeks of that.

...

When I started my official website, it came with a blog.  The blog software is terrible to use - all the worst aspects of WordPress and buggy as all hell.  I can spend three days trying to get a single entry to work.  Needless to say, I don't blog on that much.

...

The other day I released a video on youtube and I thought, googlelove is gained by having many links from many places.  I'll share it on my old blog.  

The thing is, I liked it.  I miss it.  I miss blogging.

I started blogging again.  I set some posts to release on schedule.  NOT DAILY this time.  That was way too much.  but just once a week for a while to share what I think is neat.  

Or to monologue.  

I haven't seen a real blog in so long - like an honest, I'm just writing to share the nifty things in my life rather than someone doing it for the main income (which isn't bad - it's just a different style than what I'm seeking)

...

Do people still write traditional blogs?  Do people still read traditional blogs?

r ranson wrote:Do people still write traditional blogs?  Do people still read traditional blogs?

Yes and yes, although it seems to be a relatively small niche these days. I started as a cat blogger (of all things) in 2006, then started a fiber blog shortly thereafter. I started my homestead blog in 2009 when we bought our place. One of my fiber friends was interested in seeing photos, so I started a new blog for it.

The only one I keep up is the homestead blog. It's very old-fashioned in that I don't do ads, pop-ups, or mailing lists. I have turned down tons of requests from folks wanting to submit guest posts, or get me to advertise their product or add a link to my link lists. I view it as a personal journal of our journey toward self-sufficiency. The only "advertising" exception is that I occasionally plug my own or others' books, or hard-to-find resources that meet with our homestead and permaculture values.

The regulars who comment generally have the same kind of blogs; mostly homestead or garden themed. There's a sense of community in that we all take the time to read one another's blogs and comment to encourage one another. We're all busy with our lives, so the pace is casual. But I would probably continue to blog even without visitors and comments, because it's proved priceless as a record of plans, ideas, projects, and progress. Numerous times, we've gone back to check when or how we did something.

I'm glad to hear you're blogging again! I, for one, will be interested in reading it.

The first ever blog post I made, far as I can discover, was in 2006, but that was work related.

In 2009 my first personal post was this:

There is no risk if you only live in the past or the future.
Without risk, there is no adventure.
Without adventure, there is no life worth living.

I didn't provide an attribution so I assume that was something I came up with myself.  

I've been an erratic blogger, which I understand isn't optimal but it's who I am.  Part of the reason for not posting regularly is that I've got a bunch of blogs going.  My personal one is on my website, https://lifstrand.com, I've got several others on Blogger  - but I only work two of them steadily (one on music & magic and another on what I call spiritual horsemanship).  I think I've got a few barely touched blogs elsewhere.  My bad.  I don't make money off my blogs -- I like to write and I like other people to read my writing.  

I'm a bit of a delinquent blogger.  I really haven't posted much this year although my SkyeEnt 'Blog dates back to the start of 2017. I never tried to promote it or make money from it so Wordpress put the odd advert on it.  I used to enjoy reading other people's 'blogs on wordpress, but these days don't seem to be having much spare time (my life isn't how life is supposed to be at the moment). I used to put a post up about every other week, using it as a diary and record of what I was getting up to, I sort of thought my family might enjoy seeing what I was doing since I moved away, but I don't think they actually follow it.  I tried to make it a 'warts and all' record, but you do find yourself selecting the picture that doesn't show the heap of dirty laundry, or pile of broken plastic pots....I also forget to record always when things don't work out, all the seeds that don't sprout, or get munched by slugs.  It's much more exciting when they do.  I'm using Permies as a means of communication just now, and it's nice how interacive it is.  I may swap my SkyeEnt blog to here actually.....

Funny you should mention blogging - I’ve just started my 5th or 6th . . . I’m filling in all the static pages before it goes live. It will be old school, no ads, monologuing about my life, mostly my permaculture journey. It took me a long time to realise that the best blogs are written for an audience of one. If it brings you joy, keep at it, you can be the audience of one although I’m sure others will read it.

The internet was a much cooler place when people blogged rather than just posted status updates. I used Googles reader when Google was cool, not creepy. They killed it and so it was a lot harder to follow people and then they  all migrating to the Facebook cesspool for the ‘likes’.

I’d love to find a proper old school blog aggregator like reader. One of the reasons I’ve jumped right in here is it’s also kinda old school too, a time when most conversations on the internet took place in open forums. I’m sure that was Paul’s intention and hats off to him.

Lif Strand wrote:...I've been an erratic blogger, which I understand isn't optimal but it's who I am...

I forgot that one of the first serious attempts I made at weekly blogging was a kind of cheat.  In 2013 a friend of mine started emailing a bunch of us a "52 Weeks To Family Preparedness for Two" plan and I realized that this was valuable info that should be more broadly shared.  She emailed and then, with her permission, I posted to my blog each week's list of items to purchase or gather.  The idea was that at the end of a year you'd be prepared to to go for months without needing to go to the store.  I actually posted faithfully for that whole year.  

A lot of the stuff wasn't anything I wanted to eat, but it still gave me great ideas on what would be right for me.  I can't say I followed the plan closely, but still, I don't worry anymore about things like lockdowns and bad storms.  In case you're interested, the Week 1 post is at https://lifstrand.blogspot.com/2013/01/52-weeks-to-preparedness-week-1.html

Edward Norton wrote:I’d love to find a proper old school blog aggregator like reader. One of the reasons I’ve jumped right in here is it’s also kinda old school too, a time when most conversations on the internet took place in open forums. I’m sure that was Paul’s intention and hats off to him.

I almost wonder if we could have a "Blog" forum. Each person could have a thread about their blog, and they could post an update to their thread saying something like

I made a new blog about __[insert little summary--the sort of thing you'd post on facebook about it]_____!

[insert tempting picture]

here's the link: [insert link]

.

And people could set the Watch Settings on the forum to get notified of new posts, or new threads. Or they could just set the watch settings on individual people's threads to follow them for updates.

It's not quite the same as having a reader (I never had one of those, but I can imagine what'd it be like), but it'd be something. And, it'd give people cross-links for extra google love (if they want it) to their blog. And it'd be better than facebook, because any replies people have wouldn't just vanish into the void like they do on facebook (because facebook like ephemeral things, not perennial sources of knowledge.)

You make me glad I live in such a rural area that the population of around 400 in the summer drops to 70 in the winter... no worries about anyone recognizing my sweater!  

Yes, I have had several blogs.  I had a fairly popular food blog for a while.  I started the current one mainly to share class notes from a huge herb class (SWSBM), then it took off.  I haven't been able to get advertising on it, but it helps promote my podcast and such, so I write weekly articles, using it more like a free website than a blog.   I keep thinking that if I had just done this one 20 years ago... like "Julie and Julia" era... WOW, I'd be rich!  Now, google has just made everything so difficult to actually make a few bucks online.  I guess if you do porn, you can still make a living... but herbs just don't fall into the same category!

So, I don't know what to do with mine right now, really.  It would be great if the written word became popular again.  I can't find much of value in 30 second videos or tweets.

I almost wonder if we could have a "Blog" forum. Each person could have a thread about their blog, and they could post an update to their thread saying something like

YES PLEASE

I'm a lover of the written word. If the only way I can learn something is via video, I'll just skip it.  If there's a movie vs a book, I'll pick the book every time.  So I love blogs.

Nicole Alderman wrote:I almost wonder if we could have a "Blog" forum. Each person could have a thread about their blog, and they could post an update to their thread...

YES YES YES!!!

I have set it so I have a blog entry every Saturday for the next month or so.   With the anticipation that I will maybe write some extra as they come up.

I'll try blogging again for a while to see how it goes.  

I have a blog with no ads; I find the hyper-commercial nature of a lot of the Internet to be nauseating. Initially the Internet was for the free exchange of information and ideas, and then it rapidly turned into a revenue generating system. Especially with homesteaders and offgrid people where this this push for "residual income", whereby you can grow carrots by day, edit your videos in the evening, and make a couple of bucks every hour. The reddit forums in particular are constantly spammed with videos.

Blogs without obnoxious ads are rare but wonderful.

I've tried blogging a couple of times.   My problem is consistency.   I get shy like...who wants to hear about li'l old me?  Then I don't post for months.

Anyway...what blogging platforms do you folks use?  

Ellen Morrow wrote:I've tried blogging a couple of times.   My problem is consistency.   I get shy like...who wants to hear about li'l old me?  Then I don't post for months.  

Better to blog some/inconsistently than not at all!  

Ellen Morrow wrote:Anyway...what blogging platforms do you folks use?  

I blog on my own website using Wordpress (which I'm not in love with but oh well).
I use blogger.com for my other blogs
I've got mirror blogs that automatically post (in theory) on Tumblr and somewhere else but I forget now where.
Also I've got a Patreon account, though I don't work it very hard.

I started a blog a few years ago, hoping to share our work in progress on a 5 acre pasture block to tell the story of it, along with other stuff I was creating and was interested in such as recipes and crafts. We ended up getting a different and more challenging block of land, another baby (and then another one after that), and life got very busy, but I still wonder about sharing the story of creating things, and about sharing things on a blog. I've been taking some 'before' photos of the latest bit of land we've been fencing off, so maybe I'll return to this idea one day.

My ad-free blog: http://thenourishinghearthfire.com/

Anyway...what blogging platforms do you folks use?  

I’ve used wordpress for years. I was surprised to read that it’s not that well loved.

However, I write almost everything in Bear (Apple only) - emails, forum posts, blog posts etc. I used to occasionally loose stuff writing in a web form. Bear syncs every character, so nothing is ever lost. I’m sure their are similar apps on other platforms.

I also used Wiby Search Engine which can be very hit and miss (but then every other search engine is definitely more miss than hit). It returns most text based websites that could run in a browser 20 years ago. The results definitely remind me of early days on the net.

So are we going to get a dedicated blog forum? (I like to imagine there’s a regular moot to discuss such things in a dell somewhere . . .)

One thing I love about blogs - and what attracted me to permies - is that there aren't any barriers to access.  Anyone can read the content without needing an account.

FB, instantgram, all those have very limited access for those who don't have accounts.  Likewise, most forums these days only show the first half dozen posts of a thread without a membership - or bar all access altogether.  

Blogs are for anyone.  They don't ask anything of the reader.  They just exist.  

I was bemoaning the fact that the old journal style blogs seemed to be dead just the other day. I blog on my own website platform. Originally started the site to aggregate all of our side hustles under one link, as well as to act as a repository for a digital copy of my herbarium collection so I could then load it into some local flora databases (I'm a biologist/botanist by training). Haven't gotten to the herbaria yet, though, that's a winter task. Lots of scanning of plant samples and uploading label information, so a bit tedious and better suited to cold, rainy days.

Been playing with the blog a bit, hoping to develop the same feel blogs used to have 10-15 years ago. No ads, pop-ups, or that sort of thing. Just typing about and showing the things that are interesting to me. We are temporarily in an apartment since we sold the last homestead two years ago, so sharing is pretty much about plants, foraging, gleaning, and herbalism at this point ;) Fortunately, I know a lot about PNW plants and how to use them, so no risk of me shutting up any time soon  : LOL

My blog, if interested.

I have a blog too, but I wouldn't call it a traditional blog in the sense that it is treated like a diary. It is nowhere close to being a diary of daily events.

And its purpose has changed several times since it was started.

It first started out to record books that I had read and some activities in my life.

Then it became a place to document work that I do with mathematics and computer programming. I write many computer programs that compute discrete solutions to math problems. Remember the Quadratic Equation in high school? One of my JavaScript pages computes solutions to those problems. And polynomials of higher degrees. And several other problems in Linear Algebra such as Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors, solving N Equations in N Unknowns, and several more. Putting background information and examples on a blog page allows me to keep the JavaScript page relatively clean, but making the extra information available if a user wants it.

Lately, I've used the blog to record work in the garden and document the growth of trees. I am always going back and updating blog posts to add more information. Between the blog and Google calendar, I have a convenient way to look back over years and remind myself when I planted/pruned/bought a plant, what strain it was, what a Walnut tree looks like when it sprouts, at one year, when the Comfrey flowered, etc.

Each blog post then becomes an independent repository of information on a particular topic for me. It is not like a diary entry that I write one day and then never touch it again.

If you are curious, here it is: David's Blog

Paul your content, information, and resources are amazing. I enjoy learning and reading your posts.
I have consistently blogged once a week for over a decade and even paid to move my old content to WordPress years ago.
No ads on my blogs and just a pure desire to share life lessons learned regarding Nutrition, Emotions, Wellness and Success that can be read in two minutes.
The original name was Great NEWS Coach.com  then friends said to change it to MichaelMorningstar.com so I did. Morningstar NEWS
While it has been a challenge at times to create interesting content I continue to type away.
I feel my readership is less than optimal but am looking for ways to reach more people.
Maybe people are so busy with so much social media and life that it is hard to crack the code.
Maybe the threads you create are helpful for engagement. The treads are less appealing to me.
I am considering shifting to video blogs next year on Youtube since people seem to gravitate to videos.
Several friends have strongly suggested the switch. I did a few on Fb and enjoyed them.
My blogs take hours to write and a good video can be done in under 10 minutes even with prep and setup.
I started a project on 149 acres of land in Belize and had planned to connect with you for coaching and guidance to role model.
After years of work getting the title, electricity, 2 eco houses (stabilized compressed earth block), water well, and planting food CV stalled my project.
I am back in the US and putting the Belize project up for sale to reinvest in Puerto Rico and start my project there. Safer and smarter than Belize.
Once I have the land and a place to live there I plan to come to visit and see your wonderland in Montana.
Thanks for everything you do to help people, improve the world and be an inspiration for permaculture .

We're pretty new to this Homesteading gig and also to blogging, but we started one up about a year ago on WordPress over at https://summerhillstead.wordpress.com/

I like that it's free, despite occasional bugginess. Not having pay for it means that I don't have to have any ads or affiliate links or any of that stuff  to afford it. I just get to write about what we're doing and share some photos, and that's good enough for me. My family reads it, and someday we'll share it with our son so that he knows we weren't just sitting around all the time while he was in school

The challenge I think, if I were trying to gain some sort of noteriety, would be that blogs often need to be pretty visually entertaining. Usually (but not always!) that means embedded video. It adds a whole 'nuther aspect to the amount of time that goes into "having a blog". It includes video capture, editing, music, and in our case- uploading big files on a metered cellular network. Maybe that's not so much for me, but I'm playing around with it a little

I have two blogs, one semi-active niche within a larger niche community (probably of little interest to anyone here unless you're Catholic and a recovering alcoholic) and another that gets very little love but I keep around to perhaps eventually experiment with. Both use WordPress which I like, although at times I wonder what the devs may be smoking.

Anyway the reason for this reply is that someone mentioned that they miss using Google Reader. WordPress actually has a Reader service; if you have a self-hosted blog or use their wordpress.com host, or download the  Wordpress Apps for desktop and smartphone you can add subscriptions to all the blogs you read. All in one place!

There are other feed readers for desktop/smartphone, but I prefer the WP reader.  

I agree that the way blogs are done nowadays with over-the-top distracting advertisements distances me from the message of those blogs. So much white space, too--because of trying to make the ads look better?...

As for myself, I have only ever used Wordpress, and started several blogs there; most of them have Wordpress' chosen ads all over them, which I have to endure  because I want to have the blogs going for free. However, I did pay for two of the blogs, because I did not want the ads negatively reflecting on my credibility/message for those two particular sites.

Blogging is rewarding to me, and very enjoyable when inspiration strikes.  It's not something I force myself to do weekly--just when an idea occurs to me. I write because I am a wordy person with an inner drive to share resources and ideas with strangers. Those that are able to earn money with their blogs amaze me--I never will, I know--but, that's not what it's about for me. Helping people out online is worth a whole, whole lot to me on its own!  

I don't have a blog or a weblog.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/blog

blog, in full Web log or Weblog, online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities, thoughts, or beliefs.

I do what many people do on their blogs by writing and publishing content here on permies.

For me, the rewards I get here on the forum outweigh anything I would get from a blog.

Blogging allayed the intellectual loneliness of early motherhood. I am so grateful for the Wordpress blogging community (the ones who make their presence on the Reader and who show up with meaningful comments on others’ blogs) and especially the poets who publish on their blogs. I even participated in and ‘pubtended’ for the dVerse Poets Pub, an international group of poets who write to prompts 2-3x/week and read each other’s work. It is absolutely the apex of the internet, for me. Well, along with this here forum! When I began midwifery school and birth work I had to step away from the community and didn’t have the energy in me, along with pandemic-era elementary schooling, to even write anymore. I got deep on that free Wordpress blog! I’d write a lot of poetry and creative writing, candid confessions on spiritual conversion and how truly hard it is to suddenly be a Christian, lists of songs, travel stories, some photography, and sometimes whatever I’d been contemplating. It did feel like a public diary, but that content is exactly the kind of writing I was looking for when exploring the blogosphere. It absolutely is not the same to post on social media, being so conscious of one’s audience and just the general shitty energy of those platforms. I hope one day to get back into blogging regularly, especially for the meaningful connections made with other writers and human beings.

Here is something I wrote on Takaya, the lone sea wolf of Vancouver Island who was tragically killed though his spirit continues to touch those who listen.
https://gospelisosceles.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/takaya/

Paul Sofranko wrote:I have two blogs, one semi-active niche within a larger niche community (probably of little interest to anyone here unless you're Catholic and a recovering alcoholic) and another that gets very little love but I keep around to perhaps eventually experiment with. Both use WordPress which I like, although at times I wonder what the devs may be smoking.

Anyway the reason for this reply is that someone mentioned that they miss using Google Reader. WordPress actually has a Reader service; if you have a self-hosted blog or use their wordpress.com host, or download the  Wordpress Apps for desktop and smartphone you can add subscriptions to all the blogs you read. All in one place!

There are other feed readers for desktop/smartphone, but I prefer the WP reader.  

Paul Sofranko, what is your blog’s URL?