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Web Logging |
| 2023-01-12 |
Web Logging
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. The first blogger of the internet, named Justin Hall, a college undergrad, was found in 1994. That site was links.net and still active till the date. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic.
Wikipedia — Blog
I started this blog two years ago because I was inspired by the freedom I felt in writing about imaginary worlds and game rules. The level of responsibility seemed sufferable, I have nothing to sell.
I found RPG Planet and I liked the openness. If you have a TTRPG blog, you can contact Alex and he will add you and your posts will spread to a wider audience.
For my blog, I asked the "for everybody else" all encompassing RPG Planet category. I am not an Indie Game or Story Game blogger, and I am not an OSR blogger.
In Keep the blogosphere alive!, Alex says "link to other bloggers (remember blog rolls?)". My blog is homegrown and self-hosted, I don't have a setting panel with a an off-on switch for a blogroll. I started thinking about making one, but soon I thought it was somehow a shame to link only to "top dogs" or friends. A blogroll comes usually in two forms. The first one is a list of links to favourite blogs. The second one is a list of "latest posts" of those favourite blogs.
The RPG Planet showed me that there is a cornucopia of blogging out there. On the other hand, often, the blogs listed in a blogroll are mostly asleep. Some blogs bypass this problem by including RPG Planet in their blogrolls, but that shows 1 post for the whole planet (IIRC the blogroll system used on blogspot.com).
I decided to not do a blogroll but to do proper web logging. It gives me one static post theme each week and I followed the "link to other bloggers" injunction by compiling End of Week links. It requires more effort than a blogroll, I have to filter each day and then compile on the weekend, but it is up to date, many blogrolls out there are stale.
Every week, I hope to find a gem in the non-"top dog" blogs. RPG Planet simplifies the discovery, hopefully new blogs announce themselves there and can thus be picked up. Hopefully more people pick up blogging, real, open blogging, not newsletters, not posting behind walls and put more fuel in the furnace of the TTRPG blogosphere.
I should probably not wish for more blogs, that would increase my compilation workload. Hopefully these days, most of the work consists in ignoring the pure #dungeon23 progress posts and scanning posts about game licenses. Will #dungeon23 fall as collateral damage to the OGL 1.1?
Let's not forget that we're not here for blogging itself but for playing tabletop role-playing games.
