Blogging - more alive than you might think

A slightly navel-gazing post today.. 

I started my blog back in 2012, more out of curiosity than anything else and as a way of tracking games and my glacial progress at painting things.  Blogs were very popular then and all the cool kids seemed to have one.  Compared with many other blogs I have a relatively small amount of views (and some of them are definitely bots!) but it was never about numbers, and the blog has connected me to lots of great people and a whole real-life gaming group.

Since then times have changed and it has felt like blogs have fallen out of favour...these days the cool kids all have Substacks, podcasts and vlogs and people post directly to Facebook and Bluesky (and... god help us... Tiktok)

 I've always kept my personal posts on FB largely separate from my gaming life but it's a great way to connect to companies and specialist groups. I've used Bluesky more recently as a platform and it seems pretty good (@red3584.bsky.social‬) .  X/Twitter seems have been largely abandoned thankfully.

But.... I had a bit of a delve into my Blogger reading list which had crept up to over 160 blogs and decided I would cull the ones that were no longer active.  I'd expected this to be a lot but to my surprise found most were still thriving.  I removed ones that had no posts more recent than 2024 and found this was only about 25% of my list, so maybe the Blogosphere is a lot healthier than I'd first thought.  Most blogs had posts in the last month and we all seem to be enjoying playing games, painting toys, and rambling on about it!  A nice uplifting moment!

I'm considering a bit of a tidy up of the blog and playing around with the layout and look... time for a freshen up.  Although there's a always a danger I'll break something if I do that!  Maybe a change of name too although I'll keep the address.