# 11 Recreating links between blogs

Since I'm in a new world of blogs, phlogs, gemlogs, I feel the need to create a new blogroll. You see, this is a list of blogs that you usually read. Sometimes they are "friends", sometimes not, but you are often interested in what they have to say. The problem is that a good blogroll takes time : time to read all the posts, time to reply and share thoughts, time to sometimes get to know people. I'm very new to what I might have called a webring 20 years ago. My current blogroll on my french blog is...exclusively in french, and is getting smaller and smaller.

Some of the blogs I have started reading have an atom feed. It's easier to read them in my RSS aggregator. Why Atom and not regular HTML RSS? I don't really know (ok...maybe to work with some aggregators and it's becoming the new standard).... I still use the good old W3C RSS, more logical for me. Maybe there is a problem with gemini links? I'm not planning to create another feed. Gemini is a kind of option for the main HTML/HTTP page but I love it more and more. The problem with RSS is that it's not a "social network feed", and some people are so into social networking that they don't want to use RSS and prefer to reply to the post in their social network. I had this problem a few years ago, but with my former Jekyll site I decided to force a reply by email. It's easy and if I want I can manually add replies to the post like an update. Now I add a simple mailto link at the bottom for the Gemini version.

I was very surprised to see feed of posts in some Gemini aggregators with answers from blog to blog. It was a good practice in the «ancient world» of blog with backlinks etc… I have to do that here because, little by little, I lost that behavior. I just have to find subjects where I can be as interesting as the initial post. Not easy because there is lot of technical posts in gopher and gemini world. I'm like «in retirement» with simple solutions to my problems, and very stable distrib and softwares on my pc. I'm more in opinion and personal blogging, here, for the moment. So relaxing...

Links between blogs is what keeps it all alive. That's what killed most of the blogosphere when social networks took over. Now it's not about leadership, about getting to the top of whatever you want. It's just about sharing information and stories in a calm and nice place. English is like a universal language now, even though most people speak Chinese as their first language. So it seems natural to me to make this blog in English, with all the difficulties it might bring, but also with all the advantages to communicate with everyone. I could also be naive and say that in a violent world it is important to try to communicate, share culture and understand everyone. Blogging is not going to change this world, unfortunately.

So I'm still working on it, trying to build a first list of blogs (see the blogroll on the homepage). For the moment, it's especially gopher and gemini blogs. Don't take it badly if you're not into it, maybe I don't know you yet ;-)

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