Tag: blogs

No Longer Alone in a Tiny Pod

Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod1. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.

Recently the Australian Posters Union decided to offer WordPress hosting to donating members. Since I already donate to them it made perfect sense for me to take them up on the offer.

The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.

Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.

Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.

  1. Pikapods lets you run preconfigured pods for a variety of web based apps. They’re fairly easy to set up if you’ve got basic technical skills and the supported options include WordPress and Ghost. ↩︎

Rediscovering RSS

You’ve probably seen this icon before – let’s discuss what it’s for.

In the olden days, before the internet devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”1, the web was full of blogs, news sites and other content. And while you could just visit each page to find out if there were any updates, there was enough of them to make it a bit cumbersome to check every site. This was solved through a wonderful old web-standard called Really Simple Syndication (RSS)2 which provided a way for websites to publish feeds that could be pulled together by a feed reader to show users what’s new across all of their favourite websites at once.

In its day it was one of the key ways people kept up with blogs and news across the web, long before we all became accustomed to simply browsing our social feeds to find things. That was ok for a while, but as the years went by those feeds began to show us less of what we’d subscribed to, replacing it with ads, sponsored content and engagement traps.

Thankfully, RSS never really went away. Most blogs still support it, as do many news sites. It’s even possible to subscribe to someones Mastodon, Bluesky or Youtube account using it3. All you need is a feed reader – these come in multiple formats, you can have an app, a web based aggregator or a browser extension. All of these do the same thing – add the sites feed to your reader and it’ll handle letting you know about new content as it gets posted. It’s a powerful tool for taking back control of how you consume information4.

Many modern feed readers are smart enough that you can point them at the homepage of a blog and they’ll find the RSS feed automatically for you. For those that aren’t, you may need to look for the RSS icon to get the feed URL directly.

To help people get started, here’s some resources that might help people find blogs that suit their interests.

Blog Lists by Topic

Tabletop Miniatures & Wargaming – I maintain a list of tabletop mini related blogs on this website, you can find it here.

Tabletop RPGs – Mike Shea maintains a wonderful directory of RPG related blogs covering a wide variety of games (from D&D to Traveller and beyond)

Blog Directories / Discovery

ooh.directory maintains a wonderful catalogue, organized by subject.

blogroll.org has another great searchable catalogue

blogroll.club has an alphabetic list containing hundreds of blogs. They can also be browsed by category.

Smallweb by Kagi provides a fun discovery tool that allows you to randomly sample blogs until you find something interesting.

If you know of any other useful resources that belong on this page, please go ahead and post them as comments below.

  1. Credit to Tom Eastman, however the original tweet is no longer accessible ↩︎
  2. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds provides a really good rundown on RSS and how to get started with it. ↩︎
  3. Here’s the instructions for Mastodon, BlueSky and Youtube ↩︎
  4. On this, I firmly find myself agreeing with Cory Doctorow ↩︎