THEY SEE ME (BLOG)ROLLING
       
       2023-12-18
       
       Tracy Durnell's post about blogrolls really spoke to me. Like her, I used to
       think of a blogroll as a list of people you know personally (who happen to
       blog) (Possibly marked up with XFN to indicate how you're connected to one
       another, but I've always had a soft spot for XFN.), but the number of bloggers
       among my immediate in-person circle of friends has shrunk from several dozen
       to just a handful, and I dropped my blogroll in around 2008.
       
 (IMG) A white man wearing a spacesuit sits on a pebble beach using a laptop.
       
       But my connection to a wider circle has grown, and like Tracy I enjoy the
       "hardly strangers" connection I feel with the people I follow online. She
       writes:
       > While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto
       Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it
       still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small
       pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity — this is too beautiful
       not to share.
       >
       > ...
       >
       > Although I may never interact with all the folks whose blogs I follow,
       reading the same blogger for a long time does build a (one-sided) connection.
       I may not know you, author, but I am rooting for you. It’s a different
       modality of relationship than we may be used to in person, but it’s real: a
       parasocial relationship simmering with the potential for deeper connection,
       but also satisfying as it exists.
       My first bloggy pan pal, Colin Walker, who I started exchanging emails with
       earlier this month, followed-up on this with an observation that really gets
       to the heart of the issue (speaking as somebody who's long said that my blog's
       intended audience is, first and foremost, me):
       > At its core, blogging is a solitary activity with many (if not most) authors
       claiming that their blog is for them – myself included. Yet, the implication
       of audience cannot be ignored. Indeed, the more an author embeds themself in
       the loose community of blogs, by reading and linking to others, the more that
       implication becomes reality even if not actively pursued via comments or email.
       To that end: I've started publishing my blogroll again! Follow that link and
       you'll see an only-lightly-curated list of all the people (plus some
       non-personal blogs, vlogs, and webcomics) I follow (that have updated their
       feeds within the last year (I often retain subscriptions to dormant feeds and
       it sometimes pays-off, e.g. when I recently celebrated Octopuns' return after
       a 9½-year hiatus!)). Naturally, there's an OPML version too, and I've
       open-sourced the code I used to generate it (although I can't imagine
       anybody's situation is enough like mine for it to be useful).
       
       The page is a little flaky and there's things I'd like to do to improve it,
       but I'd rather publish a basic version now and then come back to it with my
       gardening gloves on another time to improve it.
       
       Maybe my blogroll has some folks on that you might recognise? Or else: maybe
       you're only a single random-click away from somebody new you never heard of
       before!
       
       LINKS
       
 (HTM) Tracy Durnell's blog post "Building community out of strangers"
 (HTM) My blog post "WCEU23 – Day 1"; the section "Where did we come from?" makes reference to my love of XFN and how I wish it had stayed/become relevant.
 (DIR) My blog post about starting penpal relationships with other bloggers
 (HTM) Colin Walker
 (HTM) Colin Walker's notes from 1 December 2023
 (HTM) My blog repost "Permission To Write", in which I stress (not for the first time) that "my blog is for me"
 (DIR) My blogroll
 (HTM) My blog post celebrating that Octopus was back (and loving that my feed reader notified me, having kept a watchful eye for updates all that while)
 (HTM) My blogroll in OPML format
 (HTM) Dan-Q/freshrss-opml-extractor on GitHub
 (HTM) Indieweb definition of a Digital Garden