Category: Blog administration

Close friends will know that some challenges and troubles are now passing, and I hope to start writing again. I look forward to your interests and feedback.

You don’t need to come here to read this site. Like most which use WordPress, this site publishes its content, or syndicates using the Atom and RSS (Real Simple Syndication) formats at revscottwells.com/feed. This makes an open web possible, rather than one where you are locked into closed systems, which seems to be winning. An open web is more free, and feeds give you more options, which is why I promote and support it.

In practice, there are lots of feed readers; I use the Firefox browser, and use its Feedbro extension.

I mention all of this because my feed was broken until last night, but it’s fixed and needs to be celebrated here, in your preferred feed reader, or sites the UUpdates.net that collect these feeds into a common, one-stop site. My thanks to UUpdates’ UUpdater for identifying why the feed was faililng. (Since his name isn’t anywhere on it, I’m not sure how private he would like to be, and err on the side of animosity.)

This May will mark twenty years of my blogging, with more than 4,200 posts behind me. But for the last few years, I’ve been writing very little; I hope to change that, sparked by recent events by one well-know social media outlet, and a bit of encouragement I found there.

The meltdown of Twitter is not complete, but even if it survives and even if it prospers, it’s hard to imagine that it could have the appeal it did in its early years. Indeed, through the Trump administration, it increasingly became a vehicle for horrors, and the case for it being good or useful in spite of this became harder to justify. But so long as it had a critical mass, leaving it in a huff more more performative than useful. Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter changed this calculus, leading millions of people to seek alternatives. His sabotage of its technical capacity puts its continued functioning at risk, and the exodus of advertisers makes it financial viability even less likely. It might collapse even if it’s “reformed.”

I chose Mastodon (introductory guide) as my way out, as you will have seen in my last two posts. I’m finding an enjoyable community within a Mastodon, a distributed community with certain features like Twitter, but the change once made leaves me wanting even more. I want the writer- and reader-driver community we had before the large tech companies, including Facebook and Google and all their products, became identified with the internet itself. So Mastodon is good, but having a set of reliable long-form authors whose sites — often blogs — are worth reading is even more valuable. As an author, not having space limits or seeing your ideas vanish down the conveyor belt of attention is much more rewarding. This idea is bubbling on Mastodon, with wistful memories of what we had and might have again. (1) (2)

We may never have a new “golden age of blogging” but we don’t need one either. We just need good enough. And for small minority interests, like Universalist Christianity, having thoughts shared in the public, open web is invaluable. So I’ll take the “three post challenge” for January at bringback.blog.https://bringback.blog/. If you have a dormant blog, might you?

Part of me wants to start blogging again. Part of me says that the blogging age is over and that almost nobody would care.

I’m putting this out there not to cultivate sympathy, but to get a sense of whether anyone would read anything I write, and if so (and this is the important part) what kind of things would you like to see in 2022?

Please comment.

Thanks to several of you for kind words over the last few weeks. These have encouraged me do my best to "get back on the horse" and reactivate this blog and my Universalist Christian Initative project.

I suppose the pandemic (and before that the culture wars in my denomination) took its toll. As I look for a new voice, I’d gladly take suggestions about what I should address and what you would find helpful.

It been quite a month. A new article posted every day, and going back into August. But it’s not sustainable: making sure there’s something here every day keeps me from researching and writing deeper pieces, like that long promised connection between the Independent Sacramental Movement and Unitarianism. I’ve been reading less, too. There are more readers, but I’m not convinced that most of “them” aren’t bots indexing the new articles.

So, starting tomorrow I’ll post when I have something to say, perhaps in a longer format. Indeed, I have a sermon to write (and later post) for October 6. And for the human readers, thanks for coming by.

Looking back at the last two “what I’ll be writing about next” shows I’ve let some ideas slide. This is as much for me as you, the reader.

I’ll be focusing on

• Wrapping up (for now) the series on the Independent Sacramental Movement by looking at its historic intersections (plural) with Unitarianism
• Uncovering themes for those using the Revised Common Lectionary
• Looking back on Universalist non-geographic churches
• Revisiting by text workflow
• Reviewing Allin’s Christ Triumphant, which I have started reading

And, of course, preaching. I have a sermon to preach next week and in one in November. I’ll put those texts here, too.