John Scalzi recently responded to the trashfire state of much social media by recommending we “Weave the Artisan Web,” and I’m feeling inspired to try to back out of social media as the first place to share things and go back to blogging. There’s a lot of blogging rhythm and habits that I’ve fallen out of, and I’m not sure I’m interested in returning to blogging as it once was. But even if the short-attention-span-theater form of FB and IG remain, I do see virtue in putting it out there in my own space first, and the big venues second. We’ll see how that goes.
Scalzi has some good advice. In addition to actually posting via your own platform, he recommends reading online content in a way that you control. I’ve never stopped using RSS feeds to follow blogs and websites I want to, and it is the aspect of social media that requires more than just setting up a blog. He recommends Feedly. I use Feedbin on the desktop and to manage the feeds I follow, and I used Reeder if I want to read Feedbin on my iPhone.
I must say, it’s been so long since I was blogging regularly that WordPress looks and feels like an entirely different animal. It will take a while to figure out how I want to use it. I updated to the current default theme, and it’s clearly meant to be a canvas you can use to build out a custom look. It will take a bit of work to learn how to make it look attractive!