Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Are we on the verge of a new surge in blogs?

Anil Dash writes about the recent resurgence of the web. There are definitely many reasons why this is happening. Still, a key one for me is the growth of tools that make building websites easier for everyone.

While the core technology of the web is decades old, the tools that help make it and run have been quietly evolving into something extraordinary in the last few years, too. There’s a flourishing of powerful new frameworks that make it simpler than ever to build flexible, responsive, useful sites. New hosting platforms let those sites be deployed and delivered faster and more reliably than ever. And you can build one of these sites in literally under a minute, then collaborate with people anywhere in the world to iterate on making the site better.

— A Web Renaissance by Anil Dash

I might be pre-empting the return of the glory days of the web when blogs and RSS feeds were everywhere. As good as that would be, I don’t think we’ll ever return to those days. I do hope though, that we are seeing a return to the web as an open platform for people to build and share content.

Almost finished the new site design. Deployed some changes this morning to make it easier to read on mobile devices. There are still a few snagging points that will be resolved over the next few days, but I’m really pleased with the end result.

Updated my website to be more a stream of posts now than categorised content. I’m pleased with the results and the change to something that now acts more like a weblog. What it should have been really from the start.

Trying to tame my inbox once again

I have followed several high-volume technology RSS feeds for so long that I can’t even remember when it started. Maybe in the Google Reader era? I don’t know.

It feels that catching up with these feeds through Feedbin is becoming more of a chore than I would like lately. It’s now come to the point where I barely read these feeds anymore and simply mark them all as read. I don’t want to still read, but perhaps just not as an RSS subscription.

I have re-located these feeds this week in my daily newsletter on Mailbrew. The latest newsletter just dropped into my inbox. I have to say it’s a much better reading experience just having a limit on the posts from these feeds. Although I’m only getting the last few posts for each feed, I find it easier to scan through my newsletter and pick out the links I want to read later. This may be a permanent change.