seanessay.com
The template I use is called cenote, after those deep natural wells in Mexico. Of the six essays displayed on the page, I could set each opening paragraph to be the most striking graph within each piece, but I don’t, reasoning that long-time readers don’t want to be blog-baited that way.
Other templates might be better for a blog about art or food, with, say, a prominent picture.
I use WordPress, the outfit Scott Berkun, as a guest team leader, wrote about in My Year Without Pants.
It costs me 12 or 14 bucks a month, for three years at a time. Pricey? “Yeah, but—” Having suffered through Google’s new improved blogspot (blogger) I feel lucky to have this one.
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Sean Crawford
Digital,
In cyberspace, (Hello Lain!)
April,
2023
Should I resume blogging?
If I do so then it’s because I don’t mind that it’s more work than social media. Here’s a paragraph, bolding mine, out of a 2018 blog page by John Scalzi of Whatever.
… In terms of casual foot traffic, Whatever peaked in 2012; front page traffic here has dropped by about half since then. I can drive 2012 levels of interest in a post by pointing to it on Twitter, and the blog has roughly 50,000 followers via WordPress, email and RSS (yes, still) who have what I write here show up for them somewhere else. But no matter how it’s sliced, the “blogosphere” has become something of a ghost town. Many blog writers have simply moved over to Facebook or Twitter as their main online presence because that’s where their friends and/or fans are, which is entirely fair. Some people like to blame Google for the decline, because it killed its popular RSS reader, which was one way people kept up with their favorite blogs. I think that’s a factor, but honestly not much that much of a factor. I think it’s more simply because maintaining blogs is a lot of work and other types of social media are easier, both in maintaining a presence and in getting/growing an audience….
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Link below, as a treat for my readers, just because we are talking about stuff on the web, is to the weekly Japanese anime opening of a show about a child of our cyber age, named Lain Iwakura. Lain’s sad song, first person, is in English, because the director found it so suitable. All other anime songs are in Japanese.
Factoid: Schoolchildren like to read about someone about eighteen months older than them. But the one-season arc of Lain, who is only 13 or 14, is marked “For ages 16 and up.” One viewer said, “She’s a nice kid, too bad she’s so messed up.”
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