 I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates It means that every post published was important to the writer Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters 102 comments
 @MorganGeek Oh my, yeah. It's the overly active blogs that are a problem for my RSS reading, not the rest.  @MorganGeek @baldur When that happens to me, I just mark everything as old and start afresh. Maybe I'll skim the titles of the most recent posts in the list in case anything piques my curiosity, but that's about it. @MorganGeek You are hereby allowed to do that. 🙂 Maybe it helps that I use rss2email so I know that if I want to find something later, it'll still be there (as long as I don't delete things). @MorganGeek I solve that by having set up automatic sorting of those emails into separate mailboxes, clearly distinct from everything else. (With the exception of a few feeds where I actually do send copies of posts also to my inbox.) But whatever floats your boat! @mkj @baldur thanks for sharing! I did it in past but it consumed as much time as nowadays trying to catch up with rss feeds. Too much is happening on the web for my brain to find it relaxing. But i love to learn as well. Probably it's a trap and I should spend time doing things instead of reading anything. @baldur @h4sh Yes. This is what I've tried to capture with all the blogs here https://shellsharks.com/infosec-blogs#boutique-security-blogs. My RSS feed is rich with low-volume, high-quality posts from a diverse set of folks posting about their research and experiences within #tech / #infosec / #cybersecurity. I follow thousands of blogs but only get 10's of updates a day across them. My own main blog post feed is also very much like this 😃🧡 @baldur Totally with you. I've never had to remove a feed that rarely posted, it's the one that post *way* too often, and/or posting rubbish that I remove. That said, there's a couple of automated feeds that end up with 100posts/day - but I want to see them, and they take very little effort to scan anyway.  In that case, you'll love my art blog. Last updated Dec 2023 with a summary of the year for art in the UK and what little I'd done.. My next post was going to talk about burnout, but then I had another drama. Life happens! @baldur @linguacelta Heh. I still write letters and “it’s been a while” almost always applies. (And I update my blog about three times a year. 😅) @baldur Thanks for this. Now I don't feel so bad for not updating my blog more often.  @baldur Thanks for this Baldur! It certainly makes me feel better about our own travel blog and its infrequent updates! Silveradventures.blog   @steve_oberg @baldur I get so cheered when I see a new, unread post in my RSS reader from a favorite blog that hasn’t updated in a while. @mjibrower @baldur That is good to know! I think blogging is an important outlet and for myself, I’ve decided to try to blog more regularly.  @baldur @b0rk Here's a good one if you like deep dives into C. It has RSS: https://nullprogram.com/  @baldur This is inspiring me! This is exactly how I write. And now I’m going to add a post about “Extraordinary” here https://alflix.posthaven.com. @baldur What a brilliant secret! And when the sporadic post subject “Blogging about Not Blogging”…  @baldur The other day Google’s scholar blog posted for the first time in years. I saw it. I don’t know how feed readers handle 404 though. Feedbin doesn’t seem to remove blogs. @jgordon I think most of them back off after a few 404s but still check them, just less often. I've seen 20 year old feeds reactivate because the domain lapsed and somebody bought it up years later to use for a spam blog. @baldur Thanks! That’s a sensible approach. I’ve also seen the spam reactivation but rarely. @baldur "Freshness" often has nothing to do with the quality of a piece of media @baldur you have got to check out the app "Slowly", I think you might like it.  @baldur it's also a lot easier to keep up with A LOT of people of they don't all post every week in their blog. 😅 Your toot got me thinking about how I wish I wrote more but when I start to write something, I invest time reading through it again, fixing grammar, making it easier to read for non-natives and other editing. It takes a while to accomplish this for each article of original content and substance.  @baldur And the flip side of that is not every post needs to be a long, heavily researched and thoroughly sourced treatise. That practically killed blogging for me a couple of times during the Twitter years, and caused a lot of anxiety when I decided to start up again with the "newsletter" format. My earliest ones were a lot shorter and it was so freeing! @glecharles Yeah. This is something I have to force myself to relearn regularly. Then to my surprise it's often the shorter, more personal posts that resonate with people. (Tho, when I put it like that, it doesn't sound so surprising 😆 ) @baldur 🤣 🤷🏽♂️ And that's why I wholeheartedly believe we should all blog for ourselves first, and worry less about "doing it right." Even professional endeavors need a little freedom otherwise they become formulaic and boring. @glecharles @baldur A lot of the time when I post something on my blog, it's because I have run into some issue or another and spent a lot of time going down dark alleys and dead ends before finally figuring out the magical incantation that lets me do what I want. In that sense, I guess my blog is a place for "notes to self that just might save others some time". And then there's the occasional post that's completely different, like a book review. @baldur I have been blogging for over twenty years and have nearly always published two posts a week.  @baldur What are you using as a feed reader? I'm really into the FOSS app Omnivore. A read-it-later app with RSS feed and newsletter subscription features. Nicely designed too. https://omnivore.app/home @baldur I resurrected my blog after six years of inactivity and got several comments from people who were subscribed to the RSS feed! People are replying to this post with links to their own sporadically-updated blogs... Which is great! Keep 'em coming 🙂 Can't promise that I'll subscribe to any of them, but I'll definitely have a look at each when I have the time And hopefully others will click through and have a look as well.  @baldur You might like https://blog.julik.nl/ - it also has articles from my previous blog which was very, very sporadically updated 😂  @baldur  @baldur Thank you for this! Mine is about iOS development (usually) and I'll spend *hours* on each entry. It's months between updates for me now. @baldur this makes me feel a lot less guilty about my 'might fall silent for months' @blog The Ideophone. I've been at it since 2007 and the only way I could make it work is precisely to make it a sporadically updated blog https://ideophone.org/about/ @dingemansemark@scholar.social @baldur@toot.cafe @blog@ideophone.org Or in my case, once every six or twelve months 😆 . A few years ago I started using fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at) to keep track of feeds that were updated at irregular rates. It's so much better at this than a conventional RSS reader, where sporadic updates can scroll by unnoticed.
@baldur yes, I feel seen!! I’m blogging about once per month re #maphistory at www.mappingasprocess.net … it’s been as frequent as 4-5 monthly posts, but all my regular writing is going well right now! Thanks for the thread  @baldur THIS. I've run a couple blogs for like, 10 or so years each, I go YEARS without putting stuff on em sometimes. It happens! hahaha. I'm about "write only when you want", not that stuff they tried to drill in your head at school, 'write every day'. Nonsense. And you're right - sporadic means it's important. @baldur I’ll add my little corner of the internet to the list: https://justinharter.com @baldur you should add https://michaelchadwick.info/blog. It’s sporadically updated and it’s mine ;)  @baldur I found it easier to accept this once I freed myself from the tyranny of web analytics. I first switched from Google Analytics to Matomo/Piwik in order to go free software, but it didn't solve the anxiety of the numbers. Also, no analytics, no cookie, no banner!
@baldur In a similar vein: The YouTube channels who's uploads I'm looking forward the most are not the ones with a set release schedule: It's usually the ones that sit down and work on a project and release it when it's done. It might just be a few uploads per year, but I always look forward to them. |
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@baldur Mine now feels like overkill (c. 10 posts per month)!