On January 2, 2022, Scott McCleod posted the following on Facebook.
There were many comments on his post. I was delighted to see many people I used to follow join the discussion. People questioned the viability of blogs, people missed the community of bloggers, and people migrated to other platforms such as Medium.com. Fortunately, some are still blogging.
I realized that I had quit reading blogs when the RSS reader I used died and I couldn’t find a replacement. When I quit reading blogs, I also stopped writing on my own blog. That meant I was doing less reflecting on my practice.
As he so often does, Juan Miguel Guhlin added useful resources to the discussion.
You can get browser friendly RSS aggregator FeedBro for Chrome or Firefox. Also, here are my reflections about blog platforms- https://www.mguhlin.org/…/12/switching-blog-platforms.html
All of this was enough to get me exploring. FeedBro plugged in easily to my Brave browser. It was easy to create a few folders and then start adding blogs. With the extension installed, I can click on the extension in my bookmarks bar to find the feeds on a given page and add them to my reader.
I spent a happy hour avoiding packing for my flight back to Singapore by adding the blogs listed in the comments of Scott’s post and searching for other relevant blogs. Much to my dismay, a great many people have quit blogging. Even looking at curated lists of blogs, many people hadn’t posted in 2 or more years. I suspect the pandemic is partially to blame. The pace of distance teaching didn’t leave much mental space for reflection.
I was disheartened to see how many educational blogs have become commercials for their own materials on TPT. I am glad TPT exists. I have found many excellent resources there. However, I read blogs to learn and reflect. The good thinking that went into creating the resources is often missing from their blogs. I also noticed how polished blogs look nowadays.
This is a very plain blog post at the moment. I can see that my theme is no longer supported and for some reason, all of the tags are in an unattractive clump at the top of the blog. I will see if I can figure out how to make this more attractive. I will be interested to see if I actually resume blogging, and if anyone reads it. In the next six months, I will be moving back to the US after 17 years in Singapore. I need to figure out the logistics of doing that with three cats. I am not certain if that will leave me any mental space for blogging. Here’s hoping.
And here’s a glimpse of today’s weather in Minnesota.