Matthew Lang

Joel Gascoigne on the resurgence of blogging. Did it ever leave?

It feels like blogging and personal websites are back. And tinkering and sharing experiments, too.

I suspect this never actually went away, but I think in the absence of a social network based on open standards, it became less interconnected.

It’s wonderful to have a broader gathering place again.

— Joel Gascoigne

Like Joel says, I am glad to see blogs and personal websites gaining more exposure again and, more importantly, that we’re gathering in places to share our blogs as well. We’re reconnecting with other bloggers once again. We have more places to meet, not just the one.

These days, BlueSky, Micro.blog, and Mastodon are my regular hangout places. They are open meeting places in that they either employ open standards or create open standards to improve social media decentralisation. They have chronological timelines, don’t do ads, and all support RSS feeds.

I’m more than happy to share on these platforms, and I hope that others will continue to as well.

For the last weeks, I’ve been back to using bullet journaling. It works well, especially for my day job, for which I use a separate notebook. For everything else outside of work, though, it’s been working okay, but I feel I still need something digital-based for long-running projects.

Keeping a long list of tasks in a notebook is fine if you have one or two long-running projects, but I have a couple of web applications to keep track of and a growing project that now requires multiple lists.

I’ve tried almost every known task manager, and none of them has worked. Every task manager is different, so they usually don’t work out for me for various reasons. One task manager I haven’t tried though is TickTick.

First impressions are good. Tasks can be put into lists and even folders. They can also be tagged so that they can be filtered. A couple of extras I didn’t expect to see are the baked-in Pomodoro timer, an excellent addition to a task manager, and the ability to track habits.

It’s still early days, but it’s clear to me now that I need a digital task manager to keep track of these long-running projects. We’ll see how TickTick works out in the long term.

My NYT subscription ended its introductory offer of £6 and is now £12 per month. I’m finding it hard to justify the cost now. I rarely read much of the news from the NYT these days, and I have also deleted their games app from my phone.

I enjoy the sports coverage on The Athletic and read some articles from there every day. The Wirecutter is also a good read, but to continue these subscriptions individually is almost as much as the full NYT subscription itself.

I might wait and see if a Black Friday offer can bring the subscription back down. If not, then I think it’s time to cancel the whole subscription. I’ll find coverage of the NFL elsewhere; that won’t be a problem. And there have to be good alternatives to the Wirecutter as well out there; I just need to find them.