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Blarghest
The last time I officially joined Blaugust was back in 2015. Back then, the conclusion I came to was that it wasn’t really worth the effort: posting every single day for a month did not meaningfully increase page views. I’m not trying to chase page views per se, but you can’t become a fan of something if you don’t know about it. Discoverability is a real issue, especially if you don’t want to juice SEO metrics in suspect ways. So, on a lark, I decided to rejoin Blaugust nine years later (e.g. this year) to at least throw my hat back in the ring and try to expand my (and others’) horizons.
What I’m finding is not particularly encouraging.
More specifically, I was looking at the list of participants. I’m not going to name names, but more than a few of the dozen I’ve browsed thus far appear to be almost nakedly commercial blogs (e.g. affiliate-linked), AI-based news aggregate sites, and similar nonsense. I’m not trying to be the blogging gatekeeper here, but is there no vetting process to keep out the spam? I suppose that may be a bit much when 100+ people/bots sign up, but it also seems deeply counter-productive to the mission statement of:
Posting regularly builds a community and in this era of AI-slop content, our voices are needed even more than we ever have been at any point in the past.
Ahem. The calls are coming from inside the house, my friends.
[Fake Edit] In fairness, after getting through all 76 of the original list, the number of spam blogs did not increase much. Perhaps a non-standard ordering mechanism would have left a better first impression.
Anyway, we’ll have to see how this Blaugust plays out. I have added 10-20 new blogs to my Feedly roll, and am interested to see where they go from here. Their initial stuff was good enough for my curiosity. The real trick though, is who is still posting in September.
Stuff, and Other Things
So, there are a lot of things going on in the next few weeks, and it has impacted (and may continue doing so) my posting schedule. Basically, I’m moving to a new apartment, applying for a Grad School scholarship in Japan (all expenses paid, if I get it), getting ready for a completely unrelated vacation in Japan this August, and playing videogames like a madman in effort to unpack the stress of all of that. I might start doing shorter posts of my various digital escapades rather than attempt to forward some kind of thesis every time I write something, but we’ll see. Hell, there’s been a decent amount of juicy gaming news, but sometimes it’s tough to write without a narrative.
By the way, if you have suggestions for good blogs that you read that are not already listed on the sidebar, by all means let me know in the comments below (or email); I might not directly add them to the sidebar, but I promise to take a look. My Feedly app keeps me sane during breaks at work, and my normal dealers seem to be on vacation lately. Or, you know, they might be in similar situations to myself. Nevertheless, this dry spell couldn’t have come at a worse time. Feed me your words/arguments.
In An Age 
Dumb Problems
Oct 23
Posted by Azuriel
I’m going to talk about a dumb blogging problem I experienced recently, so feel free to skip this one.
Like most problems in the world, it started with Tobold. I’ve been a persona non grata in his comment section for years now, but I’ve kept his blog on my Feedly for masochistic reasons. One of his latest posts was so unbelievably asinine though – “Trump isn’t doing any permanent damage!” – that I had had enough. That’s when I realized that I still had him linked over in the Blogroll section of my sidebar, so I figured I should take care of that too.
Big mistake.
Over the years, I have often heard people complain about WordPress, sometimes vehemently enough to drive them to self-host and even try and reinvent the Comment section wheel. While I had misgivings when WordPress changed to the “block” format many years ago, for the most part all the nonsense seemed to just happen to Other People. As it turns out, that’s because WordPress does indeed make inexplicable changes and then hides them in a sort of load-bearing Schrödinger’s box to surprise you with if you ever open it. “Looking to edit your Blogroll? Well, now it’s a Legacy Widget. Also, that widget doesn’t exist anymore! Enjoy the dead cat.”
Now, on the one hand, I can kind of see the logic. The original setup was clunky as fuck: you place a Blogroll widget in your sidebar, and then add entries to the “Link” section of your blog. The new setup is… add a list block to the sidebar with some hyperlinks. Technically, it’s a more elegant solution. Or would be, if they also added information on how to recreate the sort of red bar thing.
Guys, I was raging. It’s bad enough when you have a problem that you find difficult to articulate in a searchable way. But when the problem is caused by someone else laying a goddamn trap in your code… I get it now. The extra dumb thing was how I stumbled onto the solution. After several hours, I was finally giving up and willing to try and grab a JPG of the red bar and manually photo edit some text on it when I ended up right-clicking and Inspecting the bar, e.g. looking at the HTML code directly.
For future reference:
More specifically, you have to add the “Custom HTML” widget to the sidebar and then paste that in. Change the title in the Span section to match your needs, of course. I’m assuming that the H3 (header) design is keyed off of the overall Theme (I’m using Mystique) and color options of the blog.
Anyway, that was a lot more of my yesterday than strictly necessary. Also, the Blogroll itself is looking a bit sparse after trimming Tobold and several bloggers who no longer post. Honestly, I never even liked the static list in the first place – it’s just a poor substitute for the glory that was Blogspot’s dynamic blogroll. You know, the one that allowed you to link to 50+ blogs or whatever and display whichever ones posted most recently at the top? If there was ever a wheel that needed reinventing, it is that one.
Posted in Commentary
5 Comments
Tags: Blogging, Blogroll, Dumb Problems to Have, Schrödinger's Cat, Wordpress