Is 2023 the year of the blog?

Personally, I’m not a massive fan of the whole new year, new me movement. To me, if you want to be a better person or make improvements, it should not matter what the date is. That said, I do like the idea of looking forward to the next twelve months and planning a journey through them.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been conducting some work on a new theme for Mackman, and learning more about full site editing and block themes within WordPress. This got me thinking more about the platform and the future of a blog and blogging in general.

2022 has ended with a massive cloud over the future of Twitter. Every day that passes, I wonder if the platform will survive another 24 hours. No one really knows what Elon has in mind for the platform, but it is clear that people are jumping the ship. The most popular landing spot is Mastodon, a microblogging platform that confirms to the ActivityPub standard, an open-source standard put in place by the W3C. This all feels like a shift away from corporate centralisation towards a more open and sharing web. Which got me thinking, are we heading back to where it all began, blogging?

Remember those custom domains, adding some hosting and setting up MySQL connections to perform that classic five-minute installation?

That world still exists, some people still sit there in the editor pumping out post after post like 2005 was only yesterday. For me, life got in the way and the lure of new shiny services got me. Now I have a 1Password vault full of signup details and more ways to message someone than I know what to do with. In fact, this created so much friction that I had to remove or silence services just to get a break.

Presently, I’m beginning to think that life might benefit from a good old-fashioned WordPress install, a hefty SSD and serve all my needs from one place?

My plan over the coming months is to trim down on the online services I use, bring the size of my digital footprint down, and take control of things.

Subsequently, I’m going to give the Block Theme concept a spin and see if we can’t put more content under the one roof. From there I think it only fitting to explore some ActivityPub action and see if that provides not only a place to express myself but a way to stay connected under my terms and control.