Preparing Your Blog For Blaugust 2026
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.
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.
While making these changes, I decided to split the Blogroll into two distinct parts. I wanted to list all the various websites and blogs that I follow via Feedly which is currently 200 plus. This is made up of longstanding content creators and those who have taken part in previous Blaugust: Festival of Blogging. Some of these sites haven’t posted for a while but I was reticent to prune the list as some may resume posting in the future. Due to the size of the list, I thought to best to break it down alphabetically and just have links to each individual site. I then decided to have a more specific list of the twenty latest posts taken from the blogging community and have this display in a matrix separate from the traditional blogroll. At present the “twenty latest posts “list again draws upon older data. However, I shall revise this to reflect the 2026 event, once it is under way. Overall, I am please with the revised Blogroll page and think it cleanly and efficiently displays its data.
Another issue that I am currently addressing is resizing or replacing images that are published in blog posts prior to July 2025. These are all of a lower resolution of 650 pixels. Also many of these posts do not have a “featured image” when listed on the main blog page or blog archive page of Contains Moderate Peril. This issue makes no difference to readers who view the site on a phone or tablet but it does cause inconsistency to those who visit the blog using a computer, which is a sizeable percentage of my total traffic. To identify the size of the various images that have been posted over the course of 11 years throughout over 2,000 posts, I have a custom read-only audit script which will parse all blog posts and ascertain what images are included and at what size. The data collated can then be dumped into a spreadsheet and used as a starting point to determine which images can be upscaled safely and which need to be replaced.
Sometimes there are advantages to hosting your blog on sites that have minimalist templates or only support plain text. This is because you only have to make a handful of design and aesthetical choices. However that being said, regardless of what options are available for your blog, often the owner is habitually unhappy with the layout and feels disposed to endless tinker with things. I sometimes fall into this category. However, this year I feel that I am making progress with fine tuning my blog and laying to rest my mainly unfounded “design concerns”. My advice to new Blaugust participants is to get any changes to your site done now and out of the way before August. One the Festival of Blogging starts, focus primarily on your writing, rather than the site itself. The back end can always be retrospectively improved. During Blaugust, content is king. A spiffy blog without any content is ultimately as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Creating a Blogroll
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.
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.
During that time blogging has waxed and waned. It is still a viable and popular form of self expression and community building online but it is no longer as popular or ubiquitous as it was a decade ago. Initially there was a degree of social etiquette regarding adding blogs to your blogroll. Do you add the details of blogs that already have your blog on their blogroll, by default? Do you only add blogs that cover the same content as your own? Or can you have a broad spectrum of blogs on your blogroll? All such considerations seem irrelevant nowadays. I think it is important to promote the writing of fellow members of the blogging community and to send any traffic that we can their way. Which is why I have spent some time recently trying to find a blogroll solution for Contains Moderate Peril. There are quite a few third party solutions that can provide aggregation services. Once configured, some custom code needs to be added to your blog, which provides a widget. It’s relatively simple and seamless.
I am currently using Elfsight, which provides among other widgets and apps, a RSS aggregation service which it then “stylishly” presents. At present I am using the free version which comes with some technical limitations. Blog posts from sites added to my blogroll are presented as tiles with feature some text from the original post, along with the date published and the name of the author. However, because there are differences between blog platforms and the data that is available in each respective RSS feed, some tiles lack images and other use the default icon associated with that blog. My apologies to Shintar and Bhagpuss as Elfsight doesn’t seem to want to work with Google blogger at all. I have added a Blogroll link at the top of page but this undertaking remains at present a work in progress. I broadly like the style of the blogroll but it certainly needs some fine tuning. It may work better as a side column rather than a dedicated page.
At present while I tinker with my blogroll, it would be remiss of me to not mention the one that I think is currently the benchmark for such things. Tipa from Chasing Dings has a stylish and functional blog roll that presents a broad selection of posts. It uses AI to generate a summary of the post and these are often bang on the nose. Each blog also has a custom avatar, again generated by AI, that draws upon each sites branding. If I were to ever create another aggregation website like The Gaming Blog Nexus, I would like it presented in this fashion using the python code that runs Tipa’s daily blogroll. However, such aspirations are not a primary consideration at present. I need to fine tune my own Elfsight blogroll and if it cannot support what I require, I may have to change to another third party provider. I would also prefer not to incur any additional costs unless I have to. In the meantime, feel free to post comments, advice or recommend any third party solutions.