Remember BLOGS? They were kinda neat: you could talk about whatever you were thinking about, you could link to interesting articles, people could comment on your posts… kinda like having a social-media account, but without some rich fascist deciding what you may say.

In recent months – and especially recent weeks – I’ve seen several people I follow on Facebook backing away from it and going back to their blogs: Jim Wright, Andy Borowitz, and Wil Wheaton come to mind. When I first signed up with FB, it was largely to direct people to my site, and of course the head FascistBot figured that out, and has done all he can to prevent people from doing that.

The problem is that it’s not as easy to follow blogs as it is to follow FB accounts. Which brings us back to a technology that was built for the blogosphere: RSS. It works kinda like the “subscribe” feature on YouTube, notifying you when the sites you follow have new stuff. I’ve never used it much… I used to just use a bunch of bookmarks to check on websites I was interesting in. Google had a pretty good RSS manager, but nuked it because that company is also becoming shittier by the year. I’m trying out Feedly, which I’ve read good things about.

And I’m gonna try to get back to using *my* blog too. If some tiny part of why somebody is on FB is because they want to keep up with what I’m thinking, doing, creating… I sure as fuck don’t want to contribute to *that*.