What the Blog?

9:57PMJuly 2 2019Daniel Tompkins

Archive

Blogs?? That's right. You haven't time-trav­eled. We're 19 years past the turn of the mil­len­nium. People are giving up their writing to Medium , they're leaving Face­book (not My­Space), and YTMND is dis­ap­pearing . It's not all bad...

There are still a handful of in­cred­ible au­thors, cre­ators, artists, de­signers, makers, writers— blog­gers who de­serve a shoutout. Most of these are in­de­pen­dent pro­jects— people who own their plat­form. One post at a time, they're keeping the In­ternet from melting into an ad-stick­ered bath­room— filled with liked, starred, SEO'd rub­bish. 👍

Sofiya Se­menova

Screenshot of Sofiya Semenova's blog.
Screenshot of Sofiya Semenova's blog.

I can't re­member when I first stum­bled upon Sofiya's blog . I love how she pairs each post with a "lis­tening to" link, which redi­rects to a song on YouTube. Like an O.G. My­Space page, it gives the blog a fan­tastic added layer of in­ti­macy. The songs are prac­ti­cally a sound­track to reading the blog, and I can like­wise imagine Sofiya in the zone— coding and writing to CRAY or what­ever her weekly jam is.

Even though this is mostly a per­sonal blog, she breaks down all of her pro­jects into readily di­gestible con­tent for the im­me­diate en­joy­ment of any de­mo­graphic. The de­sign is won­derful— pleasant, in­ter­ac­tive, re­spon­sive, yet min­imal. There's a good va­riety of art, code, writing, and de­sign pro­jects; but every­thing is well or­ga­nized to suit your fa­vorite niche.

From a quick in­spect, it looks like Sofiya has built her web­site with Jekyll . It also fails grace­fully— with a cre­ative 404 page that I truly ap­pre­ciate. If you're looking for some new and in­ter­esting con­tent by an in­spiring artist and de­vel­oper, def­i­nitely give her site a visit.

N-O-D-E

Screenshot from n-o-d-e.net
Screenshot from n-o-d-e.net

NODE has been blog­ging/​vlog­ging for a while. I took a look at Way­back Ma­chine's stored ver­sion of the site from De­cember 2014, and was pleas­antly sur­prised at what I found.

Five years ago, the home­page just about matches the cur­rent ver­sion— a won­der­fully min­imal list of links to videos, pro­jects, and musing; but it used to be more em­u­la­tive of an early ter­minal. The text glows as each char­acter ap­pears— one after the other, as though parsing through some code.

De­spite a new logo— a kind of flag for the dig­ital na­tion-state of NODE— the new n-o-d-e.net has stuck to its roots. The list of hacks, DIY pro­jects, and tech pod­casts are thoughtful and well-de­signed. It's is an in­sanely useful re­source to a com­mu­nity of people who care about de­cen­tral­ized tech.

In the spirit of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Cat­alog , the new NODE Zine vol. 1 (dig­ital copy avail­able via dat) suc­cess­fully ag­gre­gates and doc­u­ments tools for cul­ti­vating de­cen­tral­ized cul­ture, in­cluding: off-grid comms, DIY wire­less in­fra­struc­ture, 3D printing and tu­to­rials, walk-throughs of na­tive NODE pro­jects, dweb soft­ware and web­sites, and much more.

"The dig­ital ver­sion of NODE VOL 01 is free, and can be down­loaded on the Dat P2P net­work:

dat://d5f52282d8277c323abcd838e7b1e62113af6dfa70f3c7316ec004911881ec41
plaintext

(If you've never used Dat be­fore, you can in­stall the com­mand line tool from https://​dat­pro­ject.org , or the easier GUI desktop app is avail­able at https://​github.com/​dat-land/​dat-desktop/​re­leases . Al­ter­na­tively, you can use Beaker Browser https://​beaker­browser.com ).

K-Squared Ram­blings

Screenshot from www.hyperborea.org
Screenshot from www.hyperborea.org

K-Squared Ram­blings is a blog by

"A Cal­i­fornia couple into sci-fi, the In­ternet, and the strange­ness of the world."

Kel­son's blog, Hy­per­borea, uses Word­Press. If you don't know how to code, this is one of the eas­iest and most pop­ular plat­forms to start your blog . Al­though— you should learn to code! Kelson, who posts fre­quently on K2R, picked a nice theme— not too clut­tered, with easy nav­i­ga­tion.

The biggest reason I like K2R is that it's re­ally a blog on blog­ging. There are a ton of ex­tremely useful tips and walk­throughs from the au­thor's own ex­pe­ri­ences— crit­ical thinking on so­cial media and In­ternet cul­ture, tu­to­rials on using web­hooks and au­tomating on­line tasks, as well as tools for ag­gre­gating and cu­rating in­for­ma­tion on­line.

If those topics don't per­suade you, Kelson also has some great posts and pics for am­a­teur as­tronomers. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend adding his RSS to your daily reader for some new and in­ter­esting mus­ings on the so­cial im­pacts of new tech, pri­vacy, and de­cen­tral­ized cul­ture.

Kevin Davis

Screenshot from kevv.net
Screenshot from kevv.net

A new blog! Kevin Davis only has one post, but I'm ex­cited to stop by again soon to see if kevv.net has any new ad­di­tions (up­date: prob­ably not since kevv.net seems to only live on in the In­ternet Archive now 😢). The one and only ar­ticle, You (prob­ably) don't need Re­CAPTCHA, is in­sanely thor­ough.

I was looking for a simple yet ef­fec­tive way to pre­vent spam in my com­ments and "sub­scribe" forms— without using Google's re­CAPTCHA . I love Kev­in's deep-dive into the var­ious CAPTCHA (com­pletely au­to­mated public Turing tests) de­vices and methods.

From common to cu­rious, Kevin doc­u­ments the world of CAPTCHA . Give it a read when you've gotten your fifth @dom­stats.su sub­scriber, or feel like you'd rather have more human sub­scribers than bots.


Hunting for Blogs

I've been on the blog hunt. It started for this post, but now I re­alize that I should have been doing this a long time ago. You should too! I know Medium might feel easy and ac­ces­sible, but that's be­cause it's in the net­works _you hardly ever leave.

There are a ton of other blogs that I want to list here, but I've been holding on to this post for too long— so that's it. I just want to leave you with this: get out­side your net­works— try harder to dis­cover new places on the Web out­side of Face­book and Google. You won't be dis­ap­pointed.

If you liked this list, or want to see the rest of my picks for What the Blog?, checkout my book­marks dump— look under 'Blogs (In­de­pen­dent)' and 'Blogs (Jour­nals)'. Ad­di­tion­ally, I've found GitHub ac­tu­ally has some lengthy lists for finding some ex­cep­tional blogs. Checkout these links: