The blogosphere

Now with added newsletter-o-sphere

December 30, 2014 — October 6, 2022

academe
faster pussycat
how do science
plain text
workflow
writing

Assumed audience:

Nascent producers and consumers of online punditry

Figure 1

Blogging and newsletter authoring for general pundits. Closely related: subscribing to feeds which is a convenient and natural way to read and interact with blogs. These days there is a fashion for email first blogs, because it provides a handy on-ramp for people who do not know how to subscribe to feeds.

A lot of the blog discussion here assumes basic verbal punditry. The technicalities of academic blogging can be a little different; see that page for more HOWTOs on mathematical markup and citations etc.

1 Why

2 Static site

What I currently do. See static site.

3 Wordpress

Classic, and I used to use it a lot. Pro: integrates into other things well. Offers both open-source and hosted versions.

4 Email-first blogs

Email subscriptions are useful for enabling people who do not know how to read feeds or like keeping stuff in email.

The are a rough fit for this blog, which never “finishes” anything, but they are popular.

See email blogs.

4.1 Mailchimp

TinyLetter is one iteration of the hype cycle ago but still seems to be a serviceable platform by Mailchimp. Also there is the mainline mailchimp.

5 Medium

Pretty blogs. The aesthetic is not mine, and I am irritated by their nagging to register in order to read articles. The community reading features are nice, and they go a lot of market share for a while there.

6 Wix

OK I guess.

7 Squarespace

Not a fan of this product. Does not integrate with anything; it is a walled garden. Not especially cheap. Websites look fine but are heavy and menial to create. Suits people who really want to use a word processor that prints to the internet, but also wants someone else to own and operate that word processor. That is not me, although some people might be into it and that is OK.

8 Incoming

Figure 2: jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/ maps the blogosphere.

ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you.