12 days of microblogging: just blogging

We can come up with all the specialized names we want — photo blogs, link blogs, travel blogs, microcasts — but sometimes it’s just a blog. To wrap up the 12 days of microblogging series, let’s talk about blogging.

Blogs can be news sites, corporate sites, travel sites, photo sites, tech sites, and personal journals. They are usually written in an individual’s voice. Readers want to keep visiting a blog because there’s a story, unfolding with each post. The passing of time is a fundamental element to what defines a blog.

This emphasis on time is even more obvious for microblogs. Because short posts are easy to write, there are more of them. But Micro.blog hosting supports any post length: short microblog posts like tweets, or full blog posts with multiple paragraphs and a title.

Micro.blog is a full blogging platform, so it has support for traditional blog editors like MarsEdit on macOS. You can import an archive of posts when migrating from WordPress. Because Micro.blog posts are full blog posts, they support editing, using Markdown or HTML, and natively have RSS and JSON Feeds. They support features you would never expect on a social network, like using a custom domain name or uploading a PDF.

But along with this blogging foundation, Micro.blog tries to learn from the user experience of social networks. Can we make blogging much easier, so that it’s your primary home on the web, and the first place you think to post? There are still many improvements we want to make so that the platform is easier to use and more consistent, but I think the last year has shown that the answer is “yes”. Blogging can be easier, and if it’s easier, more people will do it. And if more people are blogging, we can start to find our way out of the problems created by massive social networks.

That wraps up our 12 days of microblogging series. You can find links to all the posts on the help site.

Manton Reece @manton