Today is BlogDay, a celebration of blogging and also the end to Blaugust, a challenge to write 31 posts in the month of August. I did not participate in Blaugust myself, but I have enjoyed reading people’s posts. In particular Thomas Vander Wal’s posts were a fun display of both technical and literary skill. But I also enjoyed Tantek and others. There’s lots of noise on the internet, but there is also a lot of cool stuff.

Some samples of my favorite parts of the internet:

  • Owls in Towels: cute photos and posts about raptor rehab
  • Island in the Net: great bird photography and personal reflections
  • UX Brad: thoughtful reflections on user interface design with lots of links
  • Molly White: crypto reporting tidbits, dog photos, book reviews, and a fantastic newsletter
  • To Ground: poetry and photography that makes me pause

Exploring the Interwebs

I’ve now amassed a large collection of sites I follow. I’m constantly pruning the list because I can’t read it all. But it feels better to read posts from real people than to consume hours of algorithm optimized video candy. Sometimes feeds go dark because life happens, but prompts like monthly challenges or blog carnivals have often incited some really great posts.

Another format I enjoy reading is weeknotes. Jamie Tanna posts them. It was the subject of one of Thomas Vander Wal’s Blaugust posts. Tracy’s posts are great in that they highlight some unique things from her week along with some fun things for her readers including interesting words, photos, and links. For example, this week featured a video of a recording of Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield, which is a jam. But she actually learned about that recording from Zachary Kai, another blogger.

While most of social media has an incentive to post more and more frequently to game the algorithm and get in front of people’s eyeballs, weeknotes feel like a much more moderate, reflective format. It’s by definition not posted more than once a week. Often people will post less frequently. It is backwards looking rather than chasing the “newest” or most recent.

I also like seeing what people are sharing. I think the post-substack explosion of newsletters recognized this. Before I got tired of keeping up with the noise, Garbage Day always had a “Some Stray Links” section at the end with fun rabbit holes. Because blogging generally doesn’t have an algorithm, people are the curators. I’ve discovered some of my favorite blogs because someone else shared a link.

My Ideal Post Format

I’ve resisted adding “repost” as a kind of post on my site. It’s a format that Twitter and others made popular, but that feels cheap to me. I don’t want to just parrot what others are posting. If I’m sharing it on my main feed, I want to have something to add; a summary, a personal anecdote. Ben Werdmuller does a fantastic job of this, adding his own experience to other articles, to the point that most of his link posts are longer than the average blog posts.

I haven’t written my own weeknotes because I don’t believe I can maintain a decent cadence. But I have a somewhat automated analog with my email newsletter. RSS feeds are the primary way I imagine people follow my posts, but I feed my week’s posts into a weekly MailChimp newsletter. What’s nice about this is it’s automatically sent out if I have posts. If I have one post or five, they all get bundled up and email subscribers don’t get spammed. If there’s nothing, there’s no email.

Recently Joe Crawford started a weekly newsletter in a similar format. What I like about his is that it collects a few different categories together. If you want to see his links, he has those. If you want to see his CSS Battle entries, those are grouped in a section. There’s something about the structure that feels less overwhelming. It’s not a mess of links; it’s a tree and you can follow the branches you want.

Cutting Through the Noise

I have posts on my site that don’t hit the main feed. In my mind, most of my likes and replies aren’t worthy of sharing with followers. Every once in a while I’ll override that for a generally applicable comment. But I try to be more signal than noise.

I hope that someday we have social readers that can better parse through feeds for different types of content. There are probably some RSS readers that already do this, but turning down the noise from a very active feed would go a long way. In particular, I want thoughtful blog posts to be elevated over other forms of chatter, but I still want to follow it all.

Maybe someday I’ll have my own weeknotes or a better structure for weekly emails. But until then, I’ll appreciate the posts of others. Because blogging isn’t just about creating “content”—it’s about sharing part of ourselves. And human connection is in my mind part of what makes life meaningful.