newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

Blogging category

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

The world needs more animal stories

After an absence of nine years, The Animal Reporter is back with an inspiring post about the unsung heroes making lives better for the abused and homeless.

I played a supporting role with a spiffy new WordPress theme that I made from scratch. This was no small accomplishment for me since past attempts over the years have ended in failure and having to resort to tweaking an already-made theme.

I like to create my own thing from the ground up, with control over every step of the way. You can learn more about how I did this in a previous post.

I also updated my projects page to reflect the new look of The Animal Reporter.

Anyway, just go read Hairy Christmas — support your local heroes.

New services for bloggers abound but I'm sticking with my tried and true

In case you missed it, blogging is back.

For a while there, blogs had a bad reputation. Many people were writing online diaries with posts that even their moms didn’t really care about.

Bloggers are now being encouraged to write about things that might actually be of interest to the wider world. Anyone wanting to promote their company, for example, is being told to post articles that are genuinely useful to readers — not self-serving bumpf.

And it’s good advice. You’ll make a lot more friends (i.e. customers) by showing yourself to be the real deal.

The bellwether for blogging is WordPress. This open source platform makes it super easy to sign up, choose a theme and start writing. In 2013, founder Matt Mullenweg claimed that WordPress had 46 million downloads and powered 18.9 per cent of the web.

Those numbers have no doubt grown since then.

Meanwhile, an up-and-coming blogging platform called Medium promises a collection of longer, more thoughtful posts, presented with top-notch typography. It was created by Ev Williams, who helped establish the venerable Blogger.com and Twitter.

Medium certainly delivers on its promise, but there are drawbacks. Your work is basically thrown in the mix with a bunch of other posts, and you have no control over the design.

You might think design is no big deal, but WordPress fans do indeed agonize over which theme to choose. There is a whole industry of designers selling themes to WordPress bloggers.

Added to the mix in recent years are do-it-yourself services that allow you to create your site without knowing a thing about code. Webflow and Webydo are a couple of the better ones.

Coming soon is The Grid, which does all the designing for you with the magic of artificial intelligence. You upload the text and pictures, and it does the rest.

Once in a while, I get excited by this new technology and think about moving newsonaut to one of them. I doubt that will ever happen, though, because the platform I’ve been using all these years — Textpattern — has way too many advantages.

First of all, it’s free and open source. The same can be said of WordPress, but Textpattern also makes it easy to design your own site. With WordPress, even people who know a lot about coding will choose a pre-made theme and modify it to their taste because creating one from scratch is way too complicated.

With Textpattern, you can craft a blog design with HTML and CSS that looks however you like. Sprinkle in some Textpattern tags and you’re good to go.

Of course, that’s not for everyone. I can understand that some people just want to write and click “publish.” Some of us, though, want to actually be the publisher.

Why bloggers hate paywalls

Some people think paywalls for newspaper websites are a good idea. Some people don’t. But here’s something I’ve noticed — the people who hate them most are bloggers.

Why would that be?

Let’s have a look at the structure of a typical blog post, including this one. It’s made up of opinions based on articles that other people have written. In this case, my opinion is based on observations I’ve made about other people’s blog posts. But in many cases, a blog post is based on articles with original research in them.

For example, one of these posts might start with an introduction to a topic, then use a blockquote from an article about that topic. This is then followed by the blogger’s opinion of it. I have nothing against this format. I’ve used it myself and I especially enjoy reading blog posts that bring insight to a subject this way.

But let’s face it, the articles that bloggers quote from are often written by people who had to do research. And by research, I don’t mean doing Google searches.

The writers of these articles had to make phone calls and interview people who know what they’re talking about. Interviews like this often involve long distance charges, and at the very least suck up a lot of time. Plus, a well-researched article should have at minimum two or three interviews to ensure a good range of perspectives.

But even that may not be enough.

Good research often means going to the person’s office or home for the interview. Or you might have to go to a meeting or an event. That adds the expense of transportation and even more hours of time.

Time and money, time and money. These are things bloggers have precious little of. They don’t make much money from their work and what little they do make comes from blogging frequently. You can’t post if you’re tied up with talking to people and driving around town.

So, yes, it makes sense to let someone else do the legwork, then add your own commentary. But wait a minute — what if those articles you want to quote are behind a paywall? That’s an expense that a blogger trying to eke out a living doesn’t need. They’ll post a plethora of reasons for why they’re opposed to paywalls, but the fact that it hits them in the wallet never seems to come up.

Many of them are savvy enough to find ways around paywalls, but they usually (in an effort to maintain credibility) provide a link to the source article. Will people want to follow these links knowing that they could count toward their allotment at a metered site? Will bloggers want to use workaround links, knowing this makes them look shady?

Yes, the clouds of obscurity so often part and let in the light of veracity when you follow the money.