winther blog

Readworthy blogposts #3

A few days ago I wrote about blog discovery, which have seen a decent amount of reads and a few have linked to it as well. I want to highlight Imperfect’s writeup on the topic, which I think gives a great overview of different perspectives on blog readership, community and feedback. With plenty of links of course. Bluelander also covered the same topic, focusing on the importance of community compared to engagement seeking. They provide concrete helpful tips for fostering that better for other Bear Blog writers.

In the wake of that, I think it is time again for some recommendations for blogposts I have found in the last couple of weeks. Go to my postroll for a complete overview of recommended posts.

We bloggers never get tired writing about the indieweb, and this post on the indieweb, algorithms, and ownership resonated with me on how algorithms skews our perception of what is important, especially when it comes to creativity.

This post takes it even further by praising how the first version of the web worked. Of course there is an element of preaching to the converted here, but that doesn’t remove the fact that ownership of your content online is more important than ever.

I really enjoyed annie’s take on laundry as a way to put perspective on global politics within the context of our own mundane daily tasks.

Not long ago I wanted to take a screenshot from an episode of Frasier, because I wanted to ask a question on /r/frasier. However that wasn’t really possible and a post by John Gruber wrote about this dumb DRM protection. It makes it even more annoying with how a completely unnecessary restriction it is.

Besides Bear Blog I have two other blogs I self-host on my VPS. I don’t have a fancy analytics system, but you can get pretty far by simply piping nginx access logs through a tool called GoAccess, and Brain Baker recently wrote about what is basically my setup. The only analytics I really care about are the incoming referrers, as they tell me if others have linked to me.

Another Bear blogger, VonGiorno, wrote about writing in another language than your native one and I can only say I feel just the same. I think I am pretty good at writing in English, but there is still missing the last 5% of my full vocabulary and general ability to formulate my thoughts compared to how I think I would be able to in Danish.

#links