I have been blogging with ResearchBuzz since 1998. But when I started learning JavaScript in 2022, I realized that the volume of what I wanted to write would probably be disruptive to ResearchBuzz. So I created a personal blog here at Calishat.com, where I write about Web search, Wikipedia, RSS, the persistent metadata of time and place, etc.
Of course I have known about blogs and blogging for decades, but I hadn’t made a proactive attempt to monitor that space in a long time. There used to be search engines to monitor the blog space (RIP IceRocket, RIP Technorati) but they were run over by Google long ago. (Meanwhile, Google Blog Search was integrated into Google News in 2014.) When I created my own RSS feed reader late last year, I decided to make an effort to follow more blogs. I created several WordPress tag-based RSS feeds (more about those in a minute) including a few focused on blogging as a practice. That’s where I found out about Blaugust!
Blaugust is a blogging festival/challenge/celebration of the art that takes place every August. It’s apparently been going on for over ten years but this is the first I remember hearing of it. With Google getting worse and Facebook / Twitter being horribly toxic, I’ve been looking for ways that I can both promote smallweb/indieweb efforts through ResearchBuzz and participate in such initiatives. Blaugust ticks both boxes.
You may not have time to blog or you may not have the mental bandwidth for yet another Internet challenge. That’s okay; if you don’t have time to write I would encourage you to participate in Blaugust by reading some blogs! Owlblog created an OPML file of Blaugust 2025 participants (139 of them), all ready for your RSS feed reader.
Of course, there are many many many more blogs than that. Let me show you a way to find them using RSSGizmos. RSSGizmos is a set of tools I made for creating, discovering, and exploring RSS feeds. WordPress offers two types of keyword-based RSS feeds — tag and search — and I made a tool to compare the type of feed content each one generates in response to a keyword.
WordPress Preview is available at https://rssgizmos.com/wpfeeds.html . Enter a single keyword. The tool will generate a keyword-based WordPress RSS feed and a search-based WordPress RSS feed from the word and show you the results side by side:
In this case, the search was for agrivoltaics. As you can see the search results were very very different. If I were interested in agrivoltaics I would probably keep the tag feed and ditch the search feed, as it seems a bit too unfocused. The feed URL is at the top of the results, but remove the https://corsproxy.io/?url= part — it’s the CORS proxy I’m using to keep this balsawood web site running.
I have generated several tag based RSS feeds for topics I’m interested in, so I get a trickle of content from new blogs as part of my daily RSS feed reading. Regularly I find new blogs to follow. This low-effort monitoring exposes me to the smallweb without having to do a lot of time-consuming curation, and the wide variety of topics and voices makes it like a fresh clean breeze in my feed reader.
The Internet is more — so much more — than the walled gardens of places like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn would have us believe. Considering using Blaugust an excuse to explore what’s out here.
