Where Have all the Bloggers Gone?
I’m a creature of habit. I don’t mean “if it’s Wednesday, it’s Pork Chops”, I’m referring to simple routines that help me organise my days. One example is my morning ritual. As soon as I wake, I get straight up, shower and dress. I then sit myself down at my computer with a mug of coffee and catch up with my emails, Twitter and Feedly. I also get a flash news briefing from Alexa. These things appraise me of what is going on in the world and often give me potential writing prompts. Feedly has been invaluable source of inspiration in the past. I subscribed to half a dozen professional gaming and movie news websites and a further thirty of so blogs, written by my peers.
I wrote a post last year for the NBI about the importance of blogging. The sentiment still holds, more so than ever at present. The world is changing and not necessarily for the better. Therefore, it is important for people to build communities, exchange ideas and interact in a civilised capacity. Not only do we need to get along but to tolerate and coexist with those who hold differing views to our own. Sadly, this appears to be “asking the impossible” at present. The world is becoming binary, tribal and aggressively territorial. This is reflected in the blogging world. Opinions are not to be debated but shutdown. There is no rooms for dissent. “You’re either with us or against us” seems to be the prevailing attitude. Facts and intellectual rigour are seen as unfair barriers to having an equal say.
As a result of this cultural shift, I find that the blogging community that I am apart of has greatly diminished in the last eighteen months. The thirty or so blogs, written by my peers that I mentioned are now either updated irregularly or virtually abandoned. The podcasting network that I am a member of still endures but has no aspiration to grow or expand. Apathy, disinclination and a sense of even defeat seems all too common. I should know, all of these things blighted my writing agenda last year. Then of course let us not forget that we are all getting older and people simply change. Life makes many demand on are time and even fandom has to bow before the school run, redecorating the bathroom and getting that promotion. Plus, perceptions of the internet have changed. The Frontier Town community spirit has given way to corporate formalisation. Being connected to other people from all round the world is no longer a big deal. Familiarity does have indeed breed contempt, or at least indifference.
Another thing to consider is the personal nature of writing. It also requires a modicum of skill and effort. A well penned post about EVE Online or the iniquities of pre-order culture can take a surprising amount of time to draft and publish. Maintaining a regular writing schedule requires discipline. Coming up with engaging content needs thought and creativity. Constantly writing takes its toll on the author eventually. For some, it’s too much of a “big ask” to begin with. Hence, you’ll find many people relegate their writing aspirations to forum comments. It easier to be reactive than proactive. It’s a shame. I see some really good ideas among the comments of a site such as Massively OP. Material that would make a good blog post in its own right.
Aaaron from Don't Fight Ducks. An enjoyable LOTRO streamer.
Although I do feel that You Tube and Twitch do provide a useful service and have a role to play within the gaming community, they are still primarily entertainment mediums. Live streams are often about the social interaction between the streamer and their audience. It’s a more ephemeral experience to writing. You Tube let’s play videos are a double edge sword. The pace of the video dictates the dissemination of information. Often, I can read an explanation of a game’s mechanics far faster than the ten-minute video that shows me. Plus, not everyone is a good or engaging narrator. Improving your writing skills is possibly easier than fixing your video presentation skills. However, that is not to say that there isn’t an audio/visual equivalent of long-form writing, because there is. It’s just hard to find among the internet white noise. Overall, the democratisation of online broadcast mediums has fragmented the potential audience. Couple that with the current mindset and each niche seems to stay on its own turf.
I decided in the New Year to return to writing daily and one of my motivations was to try and encourage others. I endeavour to leave comments on blogs and retweet other people’s work. I’ve also persevered with streamers and You Tubers and I’ve found several that meet my expectations. Upon mature reflection, I don’t feel that the community that I enjoy so much, is totally in decline. It’s more of a case of natural ebb and flow. However, I still think that the blogging scene needs a shot in the arm. If the veterans can’t continue to carry the torch, then maybe it’s time to pass it on to others? Which raises the issue of events such as the Newbie Blogger Initiative. People have asked me whether they’ll be another this year. The answer is it’s depends on whether someone wants to run it, because it really is an event that needs a core group or an individual to drive it forward.
I have a lot of demands on my time. I’m a carer with two disabled parents. I write as much as I can and do not have the time to be in the driving seat of a community event such as the NBI. However, I am happy to strike the following bargain. If someone wants to seriously run the NBI this year in an organised fashion and with clear goals, I’ll resurrect the Gaming Blog Nexus. This was a website that indexed gaming blogs, aggregating content and driving traffic back to the source sites. In 2014 it had over one hundred contributors and was an invaluable means of finding new writers. It was and can be again a good community resource. So, it now remains to see whether anyone wishes to seize the day and get the ball rolling. Is there any interest in an NBI 2017? Would people welcome a return of the Gaming Blog Nexus? Or am I spitting in to the wind?
It is obligatory to start these sorts of posts by reiterating the standard mantra that you should not be driven by your websites stats and that the data they contain can be unreliable. Although a sound philosophy in principle, it is actually more nuanced than that. Such data can be useful for growth if used wisely. I have never been coy about trying to increase my readership. For me it seems an integral aspect of blogging. Over the course of 2026, the traffic to Contains Moderate Peril has doubled. A lot of that is down to curious spikes in visits which seems to be AI scraping the entire site. Setting aside these anomalies, more people are reading posts and a lot are doing so via the site’s RSS feed. All of which is fine by me as growing the audience for this blog was a goal for this year, I am quite pleased by this development and the ongoing progress. I hope it continues.
There is a subtle difference between being rash and being proactive. Being rash means acting too fast without thinking about the results, while being proactive is a question of acting early with careful planning. Why have I mentioned this? Well prima facie information indicates that recent Blaugust participants are interested in an “official” online presence for the annual festival of blogging, other than that existing Discord server. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. Not everyone likes using Discord and I do worry that they may reduce its free functionality at some point in the future. With regard to there being a Blaugust platform of some kind, there is a consensus that it doesn’t need to be some sort of sprawling commercially hosted website running on Wix or such like. Those sorts of site require funding, a degree of admin and possibly private data management. It also a bit too “corporate” if you like. Hence the logical compromise is to have a static site. Let it suffice to say, that has been done.
Judging by the posts I’ve read, it would appear that Blaugust 2026: Festival of Blogging has been well received by those who participated in it. That is most satisfying to know, especially in light of the fact that this is the first year the event has been run without our founder who sadly past away in July. It has also become clear that Blaugust is reaching a far wider and diverse audience and most definitely is no longer the exclusive province of bloggers from one particular community. There has been healthy discussions on our Discord server about whether this year event needs to adapt to accommodate the modern blogosphere. Questions such as whether or not there needs to be a dedicated Blaugust website have been raised and explored. Should every site participating have an RSS feed? How, if required, should comments be handled. Inevitably, the subject of the use of AI in blogging still remains a controversial issue.
After a very productive month of writing, we come to the final Blaugust 2026 Group Project writing prompt. It is titled lessons learned and is usually a chance to reflect on the festival and whether or not it has been to one’s satisfaction. Have you achieved your goals? What have you gained from the experience? Those sorts of things. It also poses two further questions; “What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?” and “what’s the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?” for your consideration. I’ll address the questions shortly. Firstly let’s mull over this years event and assess how it’s gone.
It was my blogging anniversary on the 16th August. I’ve been writing and sharing my post online for 19 years, via various different websites and blogs. This current iteration of Contains Moderate Peril has been around since August 2015. To date it has 2,171 posts including this one. Quantity does not necessarily equate to quality but there are some articles I am proud of and feel that they make their point effectively.
This week’s Blaugust 2026 Group Project writing prompt is an important topic. Namely, staying motivated. I prepared a fairly lengthy post with some advice and ideas to keep people focused and writing. Then I checked it against the post I wrote last year and the year before that, going back to blogging events from 2012. All of these posts broadly said the same thing, so I decided to scrap what I had composed for today and to go with a simpler approach. I shall answer the questions Krikket posed for this writing prompt. Fellow blogger Bhagpuss has also done so and as ever, his thoughts are interesting and well expressed. Here are my answers.
Once again, I have stumbled across an interesting debate that has provided me with an opportunity to write a blog post. Over on the Blaugust Discord Server, I read a comment from AgingGamer regarding RSS feeds and their significance with regard to blogging. This in turn referred me to a post by fyr (don’t you love all these nom de plumes) who wrote at depth about the ongoing community debate about the use of RSS/Atom feeds. The article explored the importance of such feeds with regard to reaching readers and providing accessibility to the disabled. All of which provided me with a great deal of food for thought. Mainly because I use a mainstream website service provider for my online endeavours, so RSS is by default built. I’ve never really considered not having such a facility at my disposal. But the rise in the IndieWeb scene challenges this assumption.
I have written two blog posts today that I have subsequently abandoned. The first was gaming related but when I was about halfway through writing it, I felt like I was covering old ground and just repeating myself. It was also regarding an issue that can’t really be fixed. Namely, how do you ensure that matchmaking in PVP games is done equitably. As there is no solution to this issue at present, or at least not one that all parties can agree on, I decided to ditch it. Similarly a post I was working on about what becomes of my blog if anything happens to me was curtailed. In light of recent events in our community it seemed inappropriate. However, as a result of binning two blog posts, I new idea occurred to me. Do my fellow bloggers self-edit and curtail what they write about? Is your blog totally unfiltered or do you apply a set of rules that determine what content is deemed acceptable?
It is time for the next Blaugust 2026 Group Project writing prompt. This one comes with two lines of enquiry. The first is an opportunity to “introduce yourself”. Over the years, I have written several introductory posts for previous Blaugust events. Rather than repeat myself I’ll just link to the last one, which was posted in August 2023. I haven’t radically charged since then apart from my hair going whiter. The next part of the prompt poses a far more intriguing question. “If you could have one magical power or super power, what would you choose and what would you use it for?”, which offers much for consideration. Having given this proposition much thought here is my response.
A decade ago I wrote a post about blogrolls and the practical and social issues surrounding them. At the time, the version of Squarespace I was using didn’t easily support such things or at least wasn’t able to do so in a manner I liked, so I didn’t have one. Ten years later Squarespace as a hosting platform has far greater functionality, hence I recently decided to add a blogroll. That was in March this year. However it just wasn’t really fit for purpose. So I decided to revise it a few days ago and rather than just have a traditional list of blogs in a side column, I ended up producing a more comprehensive blog directory, which list two hundred plus sites alpha-numerically. I’ve been tinkering with it on and off and I am now finally happy with it. The latest update reflects the international nature of the Blaugust: Festival of Blogging and the fact that we have many blogs written in their native language. Translating text is now an integral function of web browsers, so I see no reason why these blogs should be excluded.
Today’s post is part of the Blaugust 2026 Group project, which features a series of writing prompts set for specific dates throughout the month. The idea being that everyone who wishes to participate can write about the same subject, riff off each other’s posts and enjoy a shared experience. In many respect having a common writing prompt levels the playing field and provides a sense of common purpose among those who take part. Today’s group project prompt asks the question “tell us all about your very first blog”. An unambiguous and interesting question that will hopefully prove enjoyable to write about and informative to others.
I have been writing online for nearly two decades. I don’t claim to be good or accomplished but what I can say with certainty is that the more often you write, the easier it becomes. For those who are new to writing a blog and the Blaugust Festival of Blogging, possibly the biggest hurdle that you now have to get over, is writing your first post of the month. You spent the lead up to this event sorting out your blog templates, fine tuning the backend and possibly banking some ideas. Or you may have decided to just wing it and make it all up as you go along. Both are perfectly valid approaches. However, there is one thing left to do that cannot be put off, avoided or danced around. Writing. At some point you’ve got to do it. Or bail on the event. The proverbial “shit or get off the pot”.
If you take a cursory look at a calendar you will see that the month of July is fast coming to an end. That means that Blaugust 2026 Festival of Blogging starts in a few days time! If you’re participating, or thinking of doing so, the next few days present a golden opportunity to do some practical organising and basic preparation. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Feel free to just do things as they come, so to speak, if that’s your approach. However, for most of us, it helps if we have some kind of plan in place and make some arrangements in advance. I personally prefer this approach and like to have some ideas for blog posts in the bank. It is also useful to have “options” if something doesn’t go to plan. For those who are new to Blaugust, here are a few ideas regarding preparation that may be of use to you. As ever, your personal mileage may vary and ultimately you are best off adopting a strategy that suits your writing style and personal schedule.
Prior to last year’s Blaugust: Festival of Blogging, I upgraded Contains Moderate Peril to the latest version of Squarespace. There are still some aspects of the site that need fine tuning but overall, I am happy with the appearance of my blog and its respective functionality. With this year’s writing event fast approach, I decided to tackle over the last few days, some of those finer points that need tweaking. I have wanted a post counter on the site for a long time but unfortunately there is no native Squarespace widget for this basic function. I also felt the need to upgrade the blogroll, as the current one didn’t support RSS feeds from certain sites (e.g. Google Blogger) and was dependent upon a third party service, Elfsight, which wasn’t ideal. Both of these issues have now been addressed and I am pleased with the results. There is now a post counter on the Blog Archive page, which seems a logical place to have it and the Blogroll is now far more comprehensive.
Next month the annual Blaugust: Festival of Blogging begins. Roundabout this time each year, I try to write a promotional post to raise awareness of the event and encourage potential participants. However, as I’ve done this quite a few times before, each year it is becomes increasingly difficult to present the essential facts about Blaugust: Festival of Blogging in an interesting fashion. There’s nothing worse than writing a post and feeling that you’re just covering old ground. So, this year, I thought I’d try something different and present the most important information about this annual event, as if it were a conversation between myself and an interested passer by. Feel free to attribute novelty voices for each party in your own head, while you read this. If it helps, try imagining that this discussion is happening between two celebrities or such like. Both may be wearing exotic hats but I digress. On with the scenario.
I read a blog post by Void recently, about finding a new internet home. He wrote about how he and many others have had to pick up their “digital roots” and migrate multiple times over the years, from one platform to another. It is a position I can sympathise with as I have done likewise. Hence I like the idea of having a place online where I hangout by default. My own blog is an anchor for me but it is not quite the same thing as a platform or online portal where I can find all my friends and colleagues, share content and shoot the breeze. It’s a curious thing, because as I typed that last sentence it struck how such a sentiment may seem alien to others. There may well be people who like to have a finger in multiple pies and who are happy to frequent and flit between various social media apps, Discord servers and subreddits. I prefer to focus my efforts on a single instance. A place that suits my requirements, allows me to put down roots and become part of the furniture. Like a virtual Diogenes Club.
Everyday, once I’m up, I sit at my desk in my office, fire up my PC and log into Feedly. I have various RSS feeds grouped by category, which I slowly trawl through and read anything that catches my eye. I have one curated feed named “Blaugust” named after the yearly festival of blogging event. It has over 250 blogs listed, many of which are former participants. Most of these regularly post. Hence there’s a lot to get through and so I don’t read all of them. However there are a few that I always checkout. Mainly because they’re the personal musings of some of our writing community’s oldest and most prodigious members. The sorts of guys and gals who are part of the furniture. They’ve always been there and it feels like they always will. Posting their thoughts, sharing their enthusiasm and spreading the love, so to speak. One of these blogs, is Tales of the Aggronaut. written by Belghast.
On Friday 26th June, I had another random spike in internet traffic to Contains Moderate Peril. The statistical package that comes with my Squarespace account recorded over 13k visits in less than 24 hours, which is not typical (although I wish it was). However, all of these visits to my blog arrived via the default homepage and spent between 1 and 2 minutes there. Hence, it was obvious that this was not human traffic, as there was no evidence of any searches being made of content that is available on my site, nor of the “visitors” clicking on any of the links on the top menu and viewing other posts. This was undoubtedly AI traffic arriving at the designated homepage and simply parsing the site. I had a similar spate of this sort of web traffic last November. The only difference on that occasion is that the traffic all came from China. This time round it hailed from the US. I suspect that this is something that will happen more often as companies set their AI loose on the net for what is effectively training.
I recently watched a video on Patreon by someone who I actively support as a “content creator” and whose work I enjoy. I shall provide no more detail regarding their identity because they may not want their work referenced with regard to what I am going to say. During the course of their video they briefly referenced the work put into promoting a podcast they are currently producing and the relatively low audience that it has garnered so far. The comments were an aside and most certainly not said with any sense of self-pity. They were simply a statement of fact. Furthermore, I suspect they are far from unique and similar sentiments have been expressed in one way or another by anyone who has created something the published it online, only for it to be lost among the greater white noise” of the wider internet.
When I first started blogging way back in 2007, I maintained a blogroll of all my colleagues and peers’ websites. At the time this was a common practice and a way to support an expanding community. I considered this such an important aspect of the blogging scene at the time, I created a website to aggregate posts from video game blogs, called The Gaming Blog Nexus. It ran for two years and proved quite useful. However, it was tricky to administer and would frequently break as a lot of the back end widgets and plugins were created and maintained by “gifted amateurs”. I eventually shut it down due to the operating costs. When I moved my own website, Contains Moderate Peril, to Squarespace in 2015 I intended to start maintaining a blogroll once again. However, at that time there was no native support for such a thing on the platform. Hence for the last ten years, I have not had a blogroll on my website, which hasn’t sat well with me.
I was speaking to someone recently about hobbies (fortunately it wasn’t Simon Quinlank) and I mentioned that I have maintained a blog for over a 19 years. When I talked about the ongoing cost they were most surprised, as they had assumed that blogging was something that could be done for free. I guess we’ve become so accustomed to the provision of free online services such as email, that this a reasonable assumption. I pointed out that although it is indeed possible to blog for free using Blogger, it was not the optimal approach, especially if you want to maintain some degree of control over your writing. Naturally, the next question they asked was how much do I spend and I gave them a ballpark figure. All of which reminded me that I wrote a post on this very subject a few years ago. So I’ve decided to revisit the subject and see how much it currently costs to maintain Contains Moderate Peril.
Today I started the slow process of auditing every post that has been published on Contains Moderate Peril since 1st August 2016. The goal is to correct any obvious typos and replace all existing images with larger ones. The Squarespace software upgrade I applied to the website at the end of last year has finally allowed me to establish a standard format that I am happy with. Hence the ongoing audit is the perfect opportunity to apply these style rules to all posts. There are also some technical issues and matters regarding functionality that need to be addressed. I need to determine how to embed YouTube videos in such a way that they automatically scale to fit whatever device is viewing them. Another area which needs improving is the website search facility. This needs refinement so that enquiries can be more specific. Older posts also need to be more accessible, although I am still researching how best to achieve this.
It’s nearly two and half months since the Blaugust: Festival of Blogging event ended. During that time I’ve maintained a fairly regular writing schedule and I post every two days or so. Furthermore, I finally dragged my blog template, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. I tweaked a few pages and updated the content of the “about” page. The next task is to start going through all previous posts and replacing older, low resolution images with larger, more appropriate ones. This process also presents an opportunity to ensure that all posts follow a uniform style. IE Are appropriately categorised, have links to related posts at the bottom and are SEO optimised. This will be a lengthy task so I think the best approach will be to tackle two or three posts a day. Hopefully this will raise the profile of older content, which generates the lion’s hare of traffic to this site.
I use a browser extension called Control Panel for YouTube, which allows me to determine who many videos are displayed on my YouTube homepage and to filter the content that is shown. At present it is configured to display rows of six. Something that I have noticed of late, is the amount of videos with hyperbolic titles and thumbnail images created by AI. Both of which are design choices made to increase engagement. Clickbait titles are contrived to meet current SEO optimisation criteria and as such feature more and more in search results. The fact that they frequently have no relation to the subject I am researching, seems to be neither here nor there. The same issues arise with regard to AI generated images, which again frequently have no bearing on the matter. The fact that more and more content creators do this, infers that it works and is now an essential part of the process you must follow to be seen and featured in search results.
Roger Edwards
I felt that this years Blaugust: Festival of Blogging was a success and I personally enjoyed it a great deal. However, I also thought it prudent to seek the opinion of others who took part in the event, as ultimately that is what it’s all about. Hence I posted the Blaugust 2026 Participant Survey at the beginning of September and left it online for 3 weeks. The questions were straightforward and unambiguous. Did you enjoy the festival. Did you participate in the group writing prompts. Did you achieve your writing goals. Then there where questions about what additions, if any, you’d like to see added to Blaugust in the future. All pretty standard stuff for a post event questionnaire. Well the results have been analysed and here is a summary of the results. The intention is to see if there are any specific trends revealed in the feedback and to then discuss any potential course of action as a result. As ever feel free to leave comments below.