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Blogging in the Modern EraGB819: October 15, 2017 |
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In the past, the main way to measure the outreach of a blog was by the amount of views and amount of comments. However, we are now in the era where social media has gained influence, therefore the influence of a post can extend far beyond its own domain name through shares and copy/pastes. Much like the DPRK supporter Dennis Rodman was able to influence a basketball game without scoring a point, it is now possible because of social media to influence discussion and not have much discussion or readership in the original location.
On previous websites I created, the goal was to enable a comment system and connect various components of the website through RSS feeds. However with the native wordpress commenting comes a lot of spam and spam has to be separated from legitimate comments. Now the wordpress commenting system has been replaced with disqus which allows social media profiles to directly comment on the blog. There are buttons to share the posts on social media and facebook, linkedin and twitter will show “previews” of the post automatically. Not to be overly demeaning, but I was one of the first people active on blogs and forums to “realize” that there was a world outside of those blog and forums as long as you are willing to deal with annoyed family members and “friends.” Thus while others stayed in their ghettos, I moved to social media. That I was a controversial figure within dissident circles probably helped both to motivate me to look outside of those circles for an audience and to be willing to absorb negative feedback there, as I had already received such feedback on blogs and forums. However, the move to social media has now been followed by the masses and I am no longer an outlier for using it as an alternative audience for my antics (while the original facebook posters are more interested in who got married and the latest photo of a party).
What we see on the modern termite underground setup is a blog that is designed to synthesize the blogging world and the path I have paved on social media (as I stepped there before most other bloggers and forum posters did) by allowing people to comment on social media profiles and by setting up the blog to be shared easily with automatic previews.
The main technological changes between this modern era blog and older blogs are as follows:
- Separate mobile and normal themes installed
- use of thumbnail images (which appear on facebook if posted there)
- use of disqus commenting system
Mobile themes are great at what they do but they do not look as good on a desktop. They’re trimmed down to be efficient, but because of that they do not take advantage of the computer screen like the “old themes” do. So my move was to run two different themes concurrently for different devices and to make substantial edits to the PHP and CSS code of those themes and replace images by hand where the option was not available to do it through software.
The decision to go with a discussion group setup instead of a forum setup for the other part of the website was more of an experience based decision. An empty forum has trouble getting started because there are too many categories and too little people to post in them (but on termite underground users make “groups” as needed) and then gets into political issues with moderators and administrators. The issues of forum politics will not happen here because if you do not like someone you can just make a new group and not include them in it. BBcode was never important to me and I think it’s a good idea that people learn to make HTMl based posts. BBcode is much less popular now than earlier.
Note that I have shut off “post revisions” on wordpress because I like to write in drafts and don’t want 35 different versions saved from each time I hit save. From that vantage point, I’m going to stop writing now and come back and edit later. This is something that has not changed. I wrote in drafts even in the old era.
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