What I Want From A Blog

It’s not block editing…

Photo by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash

I came to know what a blog was sometime in 2002. Back then my friends were using LiveJournal or Blogger to do little daily updates, vent their frustrations, or talk about whatever. These olden days were much more anonymous with everyone working out their brand new usernames to go by online. You could start a blog with a fresh email and username and vent about work, family, and life in general. All those things we know not to do/use online now because of security reasons were the default in those days. This led blogs to act more like a diary or journal (because that’s what the intent was) than a list of top searched keywords and Amazon affiliate links.

Around 2005 or 2006 I started using Wordpress. It was great at the time. Easy to set up a something.wordpress blog and go to town. The incentive to host your own blog was so you could use your own domain and upload custom plugins. I think it was at the custom plug-in stage that Wordpress started to inflate a bit. Plug-ins for SEO and Adsense, custom ad placement etc we’re all the rage. That was when you could do a daily post on a topic and the traffic would bring in enough revenue to make it your job. Write about ramen? Now you’re the ramen blogger.

With that new onslaught of ads on every website from here to the moon folks got wise with ad blockers. The commercial blog market was flooded, and the ads weren’t enough to keep them afloat. But that’s fine because that meant any surviving blogs were simply a passion project and not out to sell you diet supplements or how-to ebooks. Right?

Well, we know most of the influencers moved from blogs to YouTube/Instagram/TickTok and they can all stay there. But what about blog software? I think the pivot from longform text posts to tweets and videos forced companies like Wordpress to become fully fledged drag and drop website building tools. And with that comes major bloat.

Wordpress switched to block elements for literally everything from images to paragraphs. It’s great for semi permanent info with lots of photos and subheadings. For someone who wants to sit on the couch at the end of the day and make a post about the decapitated snake they saw in the HEB parking lot from their phone along with a photo, good luck.

Want to set up an online shop or a landing site for your company? Wordpress, Squarespace, WIX, etc will get you running in a day. All of those can still spool up a big meaty blog but as I point out, the writers and readers who want less bloat have more options now. Open source options like write.freely, Ghost, Hugo, andJekyll are out there for those who are tech savvy enough to deal with the installs and services used to get them running. That and you’re comfortable using markdown.

You can make any other kind of post from a phone. Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc all have high end mobile apps to make this easier. WP has an app that works with their hosted version. Ghost doesn’t have one, Blogger - bless its heart, be glad it’s alive, and Substacks only lets you read. For all others you’re using the admin page in a mobile browser.

So far Substack works well enough on a mobile browser for me to type up things during lunch. Gone are the days when you had to be physically sitting at your desk to use a computer. Gone are the days when you had to get on your laptop and transfer photos to edit before uploading. (We loved you Flickr.) I see the future of user interaction as being as mobile as possible and until in browser websites work like dedicated apps there will be a gap in those who blog in text and those who use video app social media.

And it’s the social part that really makes or breaks a blog environment. While I understand the need these days to disable comments you still need a way to discover other accounts/sites/users on the platform. Back in the day we did this with webrings and blogrolls. The blogroll was the best because you knew the link was going to be something you we’re probably going to be interesting in. Webrings we’re more for keeping up with blogs on a specific topic like The-X Files or whatever. The paid Wordpress option still has a feed and allows you to follow people much like twitter. Substacks app lists everything I’m subscribed to like a glorified email/RSS client.

So after all that mess, what do I want from a blog? This includes everything from software to content to user experience.

• Ease of Use - Dedicated mobile/tablet apps. In browser limits to desktop environments.

• Free option - Pay for a fancy url, massive media uploads, or large subscriber list. Free basic use keeps things accessible with the option to scale up.

• Community - Allow blogs to be categorized and indexed in a way that they can be searched and discovered by outside users. Networking is something that blogs have let go in favor of SEO and being a monolith to keep traffic on their site, that’s gotta go.

• RSS - Just as important as email subscriptions.

• Simplicity - Goes in ease of use but yeah, get rid of the bloat. Verdana at .75em. Basic architecture that doesn’t eat a phone battery trying to load a page of text.

• User Customization - Let them change the CSS file and upload a user image or two. A profile pic and a banner image is plenty for most.

• Mobile First Design - Now, this kind of backfires on some desktops when you go to a page and its got massive headers and 32px text all of a sudden but in this case you want to adopt a younger audience who is more likely to be on a phone than a desktop. An app is key for this but increases the scope.

I know that’s a huge ask, and beyond my ability to develop on my own, but perhaps someday I can sit down and start a project like this. Anyway, I think this thing has gone on a bit longer than I anticipated but hey, it’s just an idea.