Day Two - Blaugust, Blog Rolls And Beryl

The second day of Blaugust and I'd like to assure everyone not every post here this month is going to be about the event. That really would be taking the metatextual high road, which I can't deny has its appeal, but no. There are more things in life than Blaugust.

This one is, though. It's in the nature of a set-up post and also a grab-bag of sorts, although it's a mighty small bag. You wouldn't get much shopping in this one.

Wilhelm opened the bidding yesterday with a complete list of all 98 runners in this 2025 Invitational but by this morning I see he's had to update that four times already. We're now up to 114.

I left a comment last night saying I wasn't sure how I'd keep up with all of them, not just in terms of time spent reading but, more pragmatically, how I was even go to know when anyone had posted anything new. In previous years, I'd been in the habit of adding every new blog to my Blog Roll but that was when almost all of them were at least somewhat related to the boroad theme and purpose of this blog, namely gaming and popular culture. 

Last year Blaugust made quite an effort to spread the net wider and draw in bloggers from all kinds of non-gaming sources as well as vloggers, podcasters and who knows what all else, which was great for me as a reader, viewer and listener but it no longer seemed to make quite as much sense for to include all of them in the sidebar. Instead, I just whacked them all into my Feedly and followed them in private.

At the time, as I recall, the free version of Feedly had a limit on how many RSS feeds you could add. I seem to remember it being a hundred but I may have made that up. I'm pretty sure there was a limit, though, and I think I was getting quite close to it. Consequently, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to follow all the dozens of new Blaugustinians. (Thanks to Gaudete Theology for the new collective noun - it rolls off the tongue a lot more sweetly than Blaugustians, which is what I'd been using until now.)

I was toying with the idea of making a separate category in the Blog Roll and adding them all there but I didn't relish all the cutting and pasting it  would take. By this morning I still hadn't done anything about it and just as well, too, because the very first Blaugust post I read after breakfast was from Owls at Owlblog, (Aka Owls Of The Godless Internet.) who'd solved most of my problem for me!

Owls has put together an OPML file (I say it like I know what one of those is...) with RSS links to all the current Blaugust blogs. You can import the whole lot into your RSS feeder of choice with one click. 

I cut and pasted the link into Feedly this morning and it worked perfectly. You do then have to go through them all and "Follow" them individually but that takes about 1% of the time it would take to add the whole lot the old-fashioned way. Thanks Owls!

I did also try the same trick with Blogger's Blog Roll widget but it wasn't having any of it. It didn't reject it but neither did it add anything at all. There may be some way of getting it to co-operate but although this year's new intake doesn't seem quite as wildly disparate as 2024's, I still think it's probably not going to be appropriate to add every one of them to the roll, so I'm not going to pursue it any further.

To give some idea of the challenges ahead, I read just the latest post from each of the new blogs I'd added, which was about a third of the total number of participants and it took me more than an hour. I know from experience that a lot of blogs will slow down their output as the event rolls on but this first week is going to be rough!

It's always fun to meet everyone for the first time, though. I was surprised to find several new Blaugustians posting in languages I don't read so those aren't going to be taking up much of my reading time. Nice to see the range of the event expanding, all the same.

Better yet from my perspective, there are a couple of blogs that seem to be primarily focused on images. I'm always happy to see more pictures in my feeds. And in that spirit I'm acceding to a request from Redbeard in the comments yesterday, when he asked for "more Beryl pics".

Here's she is, lounging in what used to be Mrs Bhagpuss's computer chair before it started to list to one side and rattle alarmingly. Mrs Bhagpuss bought a nice, new chair but Beryl had always liked to slip onto the old one whenever the opportunity arose, so I brought it into my study and now she sits on it behind me, keeping an eye on what I'm doing. She can also just about see out of the window from it so that's another attraction.

A few of the new blogs this year seem to be actual, old school web-logs or personal online diaries, which is very welcome. Takes me back to the old GeoCities days, when I used to randomly wander from homepage to homepage, reading about the small incidents in lives of people I'd never otherwise know. 

There are also several music blogs, something both very welcome and, I think, a first for Blaugust.  I
wonder what contact pulled those in? Unfortunately from my point of view, the preferred linkage among them seems to be to Spotify, which I don't use, but if nothing else the presence of nusic-based blogs will empower me to make more music posts of my own. Like I need any encouragement...

That's almost it for the round-up but I'd like to call attention to two particular posts I read this morning, both of which had some very helpful, practical advice to offer. (Three, of course, counting Owls.) 

The first was Calishat, who was talking about an app she's developed that goes by the name of Attention Junction. Or maybe it's a website she curates. I'm not sure on the naming conventions these days.

Anyway, whatever you call it, what Attention Junction does is "analyze the historical views of two Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest as expressed by unusually-high page views, find overlaps, and turn them into Google / Google News searches". It looks very interesting and I've bookmarked it to play around with later.

Finally, I'd very much like to highlight a post by Nick Simson in which he recommends an article by Ben Werdmuller called Evaluating AI. It's one of the most lucid, balanced and downright useful examinations of the ever-controversial topic I've read to date. What's more, it's not just of academic interest, it contains practical information and advice that I will certainly be referring back to as I explore, experiment with and make use of the various AI options and vendors in the future.

And that's my little trawl through the new stuff. Incomplete of course, since more blogs have joined since Owls compiled his list. I just hope I haven't missed anything amazing...