Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net By Michael Harley

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I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀).

But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve titles and subjects. Even emails, although I don't like filling out the subject line most of the time.

He argues:

Use descriptive titles #

Please for the love of god, give me some idea what your blog post is about. I'm interested in a wide range of topics. So even if your post is about something obscure, give me something other than Recent Thoughts... or So Far, So Good. Recent thoughts on what?! What is good so far??? Especially on Bubbles, but maybe even on other blog aggregators, the title is the main signal so pause for a beat and try to come up with a decent title for your blog post.

— By Michael Harley · Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.net

I think he's right about that. A title doesn't need to be clever or optimized for search engines. It just needs to give people some idea of what they're about to read.

But I have to disagree with his other point:

Avoid bucket posts

I think this one might be a bit unpopular but I do not like the round-up posts. You know the ones. They're titled Week Notes, Week in Review, Weekly Links and the like.

I think these kinds of updates are totally acceptable, and I learn a lot by reading them. In fact, I am long overdue for a subscription update myself.

I have also been trying to do more of his next item: writing posts in reply to other people. Especially since I am using webmentions everywhere I can and self-hosting and publishing the replies myself.

In the end, I enjoy reading Michael's posts, and he usually, like Kev Quirk, gives me ideas about how to shape my blogs and my posting, and even how to practice replying to other blog posts.

So go check out Michael Harley and bubbles.town.

#blogging #opinion #writing

I found another independent blogging service in the same general vein as Micro.blog, Scribbles.page, Pika.page and Pagecord.com. It is called Inkwell.social.

Inkwell is inspired by the old LiveJournal. I never used LiveJournal myself, but I certainly heard of it. After looking around Inkwell, it feels very much in the spirit of the IndieWeb to me. It is open source, supports ActivityPub, lets you use your own domain, and gives you ways to export your writing.

It also has a Founding Member special offering Inkwell Plus for $99 for as long as the service continues to operate. I love being able to support independent web projects when possible, and I especially love lifetime deals. Of course, “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service, but I think this one is worth supporting.

Stanton, Inkwell's owner and creator, is also very open about his use of AI and LLM tools. He uses Claude to help write code, documentation and debug the service, while saying he personally reviews and ships the changes.

I am okay with a small independent creator using AI this way. Inkwell is getting off the ground, it is being run by one person with a day job, and hiring an entire development team obviously isn't realistic. This is one area where I think AI can be a positive force. It can help small businesses and independent developers get started, keep costs down and build things that previously might have required a much larger team.

Inkwell is also refreshingly transparent about how it operates. There are no ads, no investors and it says it does not sell your data. It even publishes what the service costs to operate and how much of those costs are currently covered by members.

So, if you are so inclined, stop by and take a look. For what it offers, I think Inkwell.social provides a lot for its $5 monthly price.

Going forward, you will find my posts there too. Here's to a long life for the service.

Competition and choice among independent publishing platforms can only enrich the IndieWeb and the Internet as a whole.

#blogging #personal #technology