My history with blogging (what about YOU?)

As I recently posted on Bluesky, using Leaflet has helped me rediscover the joy in blogging. I still remember the early nineties, when I had manually code HTML pages. Any other old-timer bloggers out there?

Back in April 1997, I also started a personal blog called Blatherings (yes, the original version). I didn't have any particular theme or goal in mind, but just found it a fun venue for talking about whatever was on my mind. The term "social media" didn't exist back then.

Anyone else remember Livejournal? Greymatter? Movable Type? I've also tried Blogger, Squarespace, among others. I've had a Substack And my DebbieOhi.com website blog is hosted on Wordpress.

My goals with blogging have changed over the decades, and I have also experimented with different kinds of blogs for different kinds of content. There are so many wonderful blogging tools available now, compared to the Ancient Days.

In the past few years, however, I've been blogging less and less. I've been thinking a lot about why, and the reasons basically boil down to the following:

Reason #1: I have been focussing on lengthy articles that require a lot of research, interviews that require a lot of back-and-forth and finessing and editing.

Reason #2: Twitter changed in ways that made me realize it was no longer the place I wanted to hang out. I left, and so did many in the communities I was used to finding on Twitter. Unless people had my blog in their RSS feed, Twitter was also the platform where most of my readers found out about new posts. (Psst: Now you can use @standard-reader.app , or subscribe via Bluesky, or one of many other ways!)

Reason #3: Interaction with blogs declined as more people's attention spans declined as so many of us were stressed out by what was happening in the world, and also were overwhelmed by all the social media and blogging options out there. This meant that I could no longer just post content on my blog and expect people to find it. It was frustrating when I put so much time and effort into those lengthy articles mentioned in Reason #1 but then felt like very few people were actually reading them, largely because of Reason #2 (I no longer had a place where I could let people know what/when I was blogging about).

AT Proto blogging platforms like @leaflet.pub give me hope! So much so that I decided to start up a blog called Blatherings again. And while I don't entirely understand all the techie nuances of AT Protocol, I grasp enough to be excited and hopeful about blogging again.

And I look forward to doing more Blathering in a blog whose content will not be carefully scheduled and planned out and outlined in advance.

This post is an example. It was originally supposed to be JUST about trying out Leaflet's image gallery feature! But then I started writing about the old days of blogging and decided to go with it. 😜

But I digress.

Above: my experiment with Leaflet's grid display of images.

Below: my experiment with Leaflet's carousel display of images (in theory, you should be able to use the side arrows to navigate through):

I also love that Leaflet makes it easy to add alt text to each image!

QUESTION: Any other ancient bloggers out there? If so, what were YOUR favourite platforms?