The most important blog aspect is the blog roll! Each blog is an off-ramp on the information superhighway and a blog roll is a signpost to direct to other blogs.
My introduction into the blogosphere is lost to time now, who can say which post it was that lured me in but it was probably a goblinpunch article some time in 2013-2014. At the time I hadn't yet run so much as a single game but was always thinking about it. Finding the blogosphere was an infernal fuel and seemingly bottomless well of creativity and diverse ideas across a huge sprawling beast.
Sure to start with I think I was looking around the /r/rpg wiki, but the D&D associated subreddits didn't vibe with me and I ended up preferring the then OSR side of blogs. But first, how does one navigate the blogosphere? I have no idea how other people do it, I strongly suspect a mixture of discord and twitter are the primary means these days but for me the blog roll is still my preferred method. Alright so what is the blog roll? It's this thing:
The blog list, blog roll, whatever you want to call it (blogger calls it a blog list gadget) it's the constantly updating list of new posts from (presumably) blogs the blogger reads. So, cut back to 2014 and my fresh introduction to the blogosphere: I lived off of Arnold K's sidebar and spider crawled out through dozens of blogs reading old posts, finding new blogs, filing and tagging things away in the moon garden of the soul to sprout later.
These things can go for miles! Miles and miles and miles! Go crawl a blog's sidebar and just see how far out you can get. Definitely a lot of circles and groups of mutual blogs on each other's blog lists (the need to diagram/map a blogosphere with a webcrawler is growing) but still- the sidebar was critical for my exposure to new blogs, ideas, posts, the word diegesis every time it sweeps through the discourse, etc. And so, for me, the sidebar holds a special place still as a way of checking on what blogs I like are up to and getting a direct IV feed of posts.
For a good year or two I swapped over to using Feedly to keep track of new posts, which was useful for a good while but lost the tactile feel of a blog's native page and the eternal call of the sidebar for other blogs. There are worlds to be discovered! Go crack open a blog and find someone's session reports and world building: eat well and hunger for more!
An Aside On Linkrot and Memory Holes
Of course the blog wall is only as stable as the blog itself. Sometimes blogs go down! Shuttering, wilful deletion, migration to a new page, the natural decay of the fragile internet: posts and blogs go missing sometimes. And I don't just mean a dead blog roll, who among us hasn't seen a blog roll with posts all from 2-3+ years ago? Instead I mean links going down, things happen. For me, this dovetails perfectly into my issue of remembering where posts I have read came from.
I am awful at remembering where I read something. Too many times have I manually crawled pages, crafted google searches ever more niche, and delved into the stacks to consult the scrolls in search of some minor piece of esoteric blogateria. It's actually somewhat of a zen experience. Still! To combat my own incessant devouring of posts and the frailty of URL memory, I opened up my Crabinet of Curiosities on my page where I keep links I revisit and want to come back to- or ones that I found especially entertaining or useful. I'm pretty decent about updating it. Now it stands as a monument to stuff I liked reading and maybe as a big signpost for someone else crawling the blogaspora late in the night.
>> Crabinet of Curiosities <<
Maybe one day I'll get to making my own tagging and categorization system. Or an index page for my own blog. Index pages are good and cool and useful especially on the more prolific posters' blogs.
Anyways, if you think you want to blog go do it! Blog! More blogs! The blogaspora is sort of like one of those ever-rotting ever-mutating webrings from the old net and new voices are great! And we need to get weirder. This place (gestures around my own blog) is getting way too normal... But don't just take it from me, listen to other people about why blogging is cool and good:
- Just Do It (this one is the direct fuse that sparked my own blog)
- BLOG!: Good God! What Is It Good For?
- Write It
- Probably others! Go crawl a blog and find them!
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