Consider Making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website!

I suspect that if you’re reading this post then it’s likely that you already have a website but if not, consider making 2026 the Year of the Personal Website. Or maybe your site or blog has been inactive for a bit, think about doing some more posts on there. Even a little thing on Neocities works. It’s just nice to have a home base on the internet that you don’t have to deal with social media mods or randos popping into every post, and if something goes wrong with your host, you just move it elsewhere.

I also just like following personal blogs on bear blog with my RSS feed reader. More people should consider getting back into RSS, where it’s much easier to see posts on your favorite websites instead of expecting it to pass in your feed on social media and frequently missing stuff because you weren’t refreshing Instagram/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever at the right time. I suspect mailing lists are probably also very valuable to game devs trying to promote stuff but I can’t really vouch for that one.

I think it’s also just fun to see what old posts still get traffic. My most popular posts on here are very old ones about how to play the late 90s MMO Asheron’s Call today, ttrpgs based on video games, and the late 90s Microsoft puzzle game Pandora’s Box. It’s more useful and permanent than an unwieldy thread of posts on bluesky or mastodon too, where you would have to refresh it for anyone to even come across it again.

Anyway, that concludes my regular “Make a website” post. Obviously a lot of bias comes from being a little older and preferring how I probably misremember The Old Internet, but it’s also just nice to push back on the internet becoming smaller and I value communication through comments on posts and emails more than getting likes and retweets.

Blog Roundup (2024-09-23)

With us now entering the last week of Cohost posting, I’ve been making an effort to follow more blogs and sites through my RSS feed reader. Here are some I would recommend!

Katherine Morayati has bee posting old postcards and the history behind them in postcardposting one and two.

ALOCASIA is a journal queer plant-based writing and issue #10 just came out. They’re free to read but donations are always appreciated.

Ephemeral Enigmas regularly covers older and more obscure video games. This time it’s about Game Boy game Battle Unit Zeoth.

Interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin goes into the history of a sea shanty. It’s maybe not safe for work.

I love personal blogs too. This one is a shorter post on the thoughts when getting into blogging.

If you want to see an example of Tosting, posting directly into the RSS feed so the post doesn’t show up on the site, add this site to your RSS feed reader.

Blog Roundup (2024-16-9)

Inspired by this post (I know it mentions my blog but that’s not why I’m linking to it), I thought it would be fun to start doing regular roundups of blog and site posts that I enjoyed. I kinda did these before a while ago but I thought it would be good to do them again now that I’m following so many different blogs through my RSS feed now that Cohost is shutting down. Google search sucks now so the only way people can see cool stuff is from others sharing it. So if you enjoy these posts, subscribe to their RSS feeds through your reader of choice.

Eniko reflects on her history with the Ultima franchise and what it means to her on her personal blog.

The developer of classic Macintosh games like Glider and Glypha goes through his history of abandoned games.

I’ve enjoyed following along with David Lindsey Pittman’s blog updates on the development of Eldritch 2. I was a fan of the first game and this looks good too.

Renga in Blue is a blog devoted to attempting to play through every single adventure game in order of release. The most recent post about is about Dungeon Adventure (1982).

Thanks to Cohost, I’ve become aware of the concept of Rosting. They’re posts directly to the RSS feed, meaning they only show up in the feed of your reader and nowhere else. It’s a lot of fun whenever I see one popping into my feed, like it’s a post just for me. If you’d like to see some, consider subscriber to the inventor(?) of Rosting, Adam Ledoux’s (Bitsy creator) blog, and Nicky Flowers on your RSS feed.

Misty has a very good post about some fonts that were on a floppy disk.

Indie Tsushin has an interview with the developer of Missile Dancer 2.

Gretchen has a post about how the internet is getting worse. Maybe we can all work together to make it a little better and feel less small.