It Seemed The Taste Was Not So Sweet
After a rocky week or two behind the scenes that I was not doing a very good job of either seeing them as rocky or once seen understanding why, I’ve made a couple of changes to my blogging life. One of which should be fairly evident because you’re looking at it, but the other is a change to my process.
Here’s a thing I posted to Bluesky and Mastodon yesterday, once I’d started to grasp some of what was happening.
I think I might have done myself some mild harm in ramping up the number of blogs I’m following via RSS. Lately I’ve started to feel the same sort of anxiety and cognitive pressure that I’d come to feel from social media. So, it’s not just a matter of algorithms addicting us. I think my capacity to filter for myself on the fly also has become stunted, with… age? Even setting aside iffiness of Dunbar’s number, my number might be, like, ten. Might have to export my subs for the record, then purge.
That’s the process change: I’ve backed out of trying to follow an increasingly large swath of the modern blogosphere because it was slowing me down and weirdly feeling like some sort of obligation. It was an idea that seemed like a thing that should bring satisfaction, but in the end it wasn’t. None of which is a reflection upon any of the people I’d come to follow. I’ve reduced the number of bloggers in my feed reader to a handful.
If you’ve been following along here lately, you know that I’d started to flail over the blog theme and design all over again. This isn’t good for me either, and tonight I spent way too much time trying to find a native WordPress theme (meaning either by Wordpress.org or Automattic) that would get me pretty far down the road to “set it and forget it”.
In that light, then, welcome to Shoreditch, currently configured as a pretty classic two-column theme that collapses to a one-column stack on devices smaller than the desktop browser.
Some of my customizations currently are missing, chief among them the post disclaimer on posts older than ten years, and the “referring posts” section listing a post’s internal backlinks. These will make their way back in shortish order, especially since I’ve finally realized that I don’t need to be editing theme files for those functions, and instead should simply be able to prepend and append them, respectively, to the_content() upon page render.
At any rate these two things—trying to read more and more blogs, and being cyclically and on increasingly shorter time frames dissatisfied with my custom theming—have been keeping me from the primary goal here: writing and restoring more than twenty years of blogging.
I need to get back to it.
Addenda
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I’ve already restored the disclaimer on old posts and the display of internal backlinks. It’s exceedingly likely that I will be disabling the Webmention plugin. I’ve had to hide them using CSS when what I actually want is them not outputting to the page at all, but the plugin treats webmentions as comments and so there’s no way for me to disable comments, accept webmentions, and not have them output to the page.
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The “reply by email” link that should appear somewhere in a post’s footer is not working. I’ve been talking with ChatGPT to try to make this work but so far we can’t get anything to successfully hook into Shortditch’s function for generating the footer. Items in the RSS feed, however, should still have a “reply by email” link appended to them.
It’s not clear to me if the “bloglog” will be returning at all, and if so where. It’s my intention to bring the “on this day” section back, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I want to approach that in the new theme, since the intention here is not to be editing theme files at all.
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I’m also brainstorming on ways to bring back the sort of “overall status” I’d had stop the archives page, which gave post, word, and year counts, as well as indicating which blog sources I’m currently importing. It’s not clear to me there’s a way to do this just, say, in the sidebar. It might require a page, and I’m not sure I like that idea much. Maybe there’s a plugin for adding a “custom function” sidebar widget?
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Using plugins, “on this day,”recently read blogs”, and “find more blogs” are functioning in the sidebar. Given me dramatic reduction in the numbers of blogs I’m reading, however, I might disable that second widget.