Busi-ness and blogging in 2024

Lots of 2023 went unblogged. Last year I only published 5 posts. That is significantly fewer even than the time I decided to take a formal hiatus from blogging.

However, it didn’t feel like such a difficult year. While looking after a toddler feels like a lot less work than looking after a baby, it is actually a whole lot more time consuming.

When our daughter was born, I still managed to produce at least one blog post a month — sometimes more. Now I almost never post.

It’s not for lack of ambition. I have hatched multiple exciting writing projects that exist only as pipe dreams. The only way forward is to play a long game. I will spend time building up a bank of ideas, then refining them. But the writing itself probably won’t come until 2026.

That’s because the new year promises to be even busier, with our new baby due within the next month.

How web publishing has gone backwards

Eagle-eyed regular readers may notice that, despite my lack of spare time, I have completely re-thought this blog. Events on the internet over the past year-and-a-half have further underlined to me how fundamentally important it is to own your own space on the web.

I have self-hosted my blog since 2004. But since blogging diminished in popularity, people switched to networks like Twitter, then Medium. Now people are scattered to the four winds.

And there is no easy way to keep track of it all, given that so much what our friends want to share is increasingly being hidden by algorithms that would rather spew clickbait at you, or even fenced off behind logins or paywalls.

How can it be that we have gone so far backwards in the past 20 years?

The future of personal publishing

I am heartened to see a renewed urgency in certain corners around establishing how people can better publish and communicate with each other online.

Mastodon is not perfect, nor a like-for-like replacement for Twitter. But it fills part of that gap for me. I follow a lot of interesting people, but the culture could be improved.

To be blunt, its userbase skews heavily towards the mansplainer archetype. It could also be a lot more welcoming to newbies and those less technically savvy.

Dramas about instances defederating from each other, which cut you off from your friends without you necessarily realising it, demonstrate that Mastodon actually has the same fundamental problem as Twitter. Sure, the network as a whole can’t be taken over by one megalomaniac. But of the owner of your instance happens to lose it, you’ll still be cast adrift.

The ideal would be to engage with the fediverse through a space that you own and have full control over. So I was excited when Automattic announced that they would support the integration of ActivityPub into WordPress.com, and WordPress.org via a plugin.

I have considered moving away from WordPress in recent years. But its adoption of ActivityPub has convinced me to stay.

What it means for my blog

My idea with my blog now is to make renewed efforts to adhere to indieweb principles, and explore the adoption of fediverse technologies.

This means taking one step backwards to hopefully take two steps forwards.

In the past I have always developed my own WordPress themes. This used to be a source of pride for me. But being honest with myself, that was a hangover from the days when front-end development was part of my job, which it no longer is.

I haven’t kept up to date with WordPress theme development best practice. My previous theme was still fundamentally based on something I coded up at least 15 years ago. It also became increasingly messy and hard to maintain.

So now I have taken the leap into using the Gutenberg editing interface for the first time. Wow, that learning curve is steep! Months into exploring it, I still find it really quirky and hard to use. But then again, I remember the learning curve for WordPress as a whole felt steep in 2004.

Unfortunately, the Gutenberg approach doesn’t play nicely with the way I set up my blog in the past. Using different post formats in particular seems trickier (or at least different) in Gutenberg, and appears to present a barrier to easy adoption of ActivityPub.

My old approach was too clever by half, in that I abused custom fields to format different types of posts in different ways. This meant that some core content didn’t exist in the main post field, but instead as metadata.

This means that my archives for some posts are now sadly broken! I will have to figure out how to fix it.

Entering the fediverse

Despite that, the opportunity of using ActivityPub to engage with the fediverse through a space that I fully control is so exciting that I want to start now.

In the longer term, I’d like to set my WordPress blog up as a Mastodon instance in its own right. This seems possible, but I haven’t got it working the way I’d like it so far.

It also raises questions about what would happen to those who have subscribed to this blog for email updates. Would they be bombarded with emails every time I reply to or boost a Mastodon post?

While I work all that out, it is already possible to follow this blog on the fediverse: @blog

Shortly, I plan to start following people on the fediverse from a profile derived from this blog.

(If you want to follow me right now, I am on Mastodon: @duncanstephen@mastodon.social).

In the meantime, I have adopted a few new features, including a like button, and Webmentions.

Other principles behind the redesign

A few other principles are driving the new direction of my blog. Three of the main ones are:

Dark mode for everyone

My old theme detected users’ preferences via media queries. This seems to be difficult in the Gutenberg world. While I figure that out, I have decided to implement the dark version of my colour scheme as the default, on the basis that it is more environmentally friendly.

Text-forward

The core purpose of my blog is to share my writing. It’s time-consuming enough to write a good blog post. To then have to either find or create a header image to go with it adds more time still. For what impact? Header images is one of those things that everyone seems to have drifted into doing, without fully understanding why.

Unnecessary images are, well, unnecessary. They also have an environmental impact. If I have images to use that’s fine. But my approach will now emphasise the text above everything else.

Fewer resources, faster loading

I’m still working on this one. In the long run I want to minimise unnecessary code and implement caching.

But as a starting point, the design now uses the system font, which means no need to download hefty web font files. Another nudge towards having less environmental impact.

Work in progress

This is the first step towards a new direction for this blog, and I have made a few compromises to make it happen.

Apologies for anything that is broken. But I hope this new approach will help me publish more regularly in the future, despite the imminent arrival of my second child!