I am really terrible at using Discord. I subscribe to a few dozen channels, mostly because it seems every game wants me, expects me, to become a vital part of their online community. But I just don’t have that kind of time. I keep up to date with the Team Spode Discord, and that seems enough for me.
There’s a problem, though, when Blaugust comes around. Everyone is meant to put their latest posts on the Discord, which clashes with my all-consuming desire to not use Discord. But I want to read those posts! But scrolling through all the posts was tedious, and for all my desire to read everything everyone posted, by the time the month ended, I’d have read almost none of the posts.
I’d put them in my feed reader, Feedly, but that only guaranteed I’d have hundreds of unread posts with a number showing just how many I’d need to read. I was overwhelmed.
So after last year’s Blaugust, I had an idea to use AI to help solve this problem. I’d been using the OpenAI API as part of my TerraChat chatbot that simulated a friendly conversation with Terra Branford of Final Fantasy VI, after she’d settled down as foster mom for a group of orphans. You would play Celes, bringing her news of the adventures of her, Locke and the others in the post-magic world. I’d added little events that you could chat about, and it knew what time it was, what the weather was and other things to chat about.
It was such a specific bit of software that I never bothered to make it available to anyone else.
There’s also the issue that running this would require people having an OpenAI API key, which wasn’t something I felt comfortable requiring, or letting people use mine, which just was not going to happen.
Anyway, I adapted the chatbot engine inside TerraChat to the purpose of summarizing blog posts. I used some standard Python libraries to read RSS feeds and capture the article full text. I adapted the YAML work I’d done for my game You Are the Amulet to provide the background for all the blogs I’d be interested in. I did a couple of UX designs to come up with a readable article layout. Tech limitations with the chatbot engine at the time meant I could only handle about twelve blogs at a time; that seemed like a good number to me.
My first instinct was to just have a grid of blog names and summaries, but that looked really boring. I then thought I would just grab the featured image of the article, or the first image, and just use ImageMagik to convert it to the correct format and size, but that looked weird and many blogs had no images, or inappropriate images (like, way too small, weird proportions, etc. Not the other meaning you’re thinking of). But also that other meaning of inappropriate. So I put whatever blog art people had into ChatGPT and asked it to make thumbnails for the various blogs.
At this point, I’d already crossed a line with AI-generated text. Now I was also using AI-generated imagery. I liked it, though. I was finally getting the sort of overview of the state of the Blaugust (and Blaugust-adjacent) blogosphere that I needed. I kept fiddling with the layout and the details and eventually found the <article> HTML tag that was exactly what I needed to layout the articles just the way I liked.
I was hoping other people would find this as useful as I did, so I started advertising it on Mastodon and BlueSky. I got blocked by some people on BlueSky, and BlueSky said that my “@”-heavy blogger tags was going to get me permabanned, so… not popular on BlueSky. It did somewhat better on Mastodon. The Cloudflare front end for the Daily Blogroll said that 400-600 people per day were looking at the site. Success!
But, not really.
I go in and out of using Google Analytics due to my twin desires of wanting to see if anyone reads my stuff and the anxiety of worrying about how many people are reading my stuff. I wanted answers, though, on if anyone was really using the Daily Blogroll. It’s not free for me; I’m a paid OpenAI API subscriber. There’s no ads or anything, but if lots of people were using it, it would be worth keeping it going.
Over the past month, the Daily Blogroll gets 7-9 views per day. Wilhelm of TAGN has told me he gets very few referrals from it. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten any referrals to my blog from it. Most of my traffic comes from search and people and/or bots looking at my home page.
So after about a year, it seems clear that this is not a tool people aside from me and a dozen other people find useful. I’d really hoped this would drive traffic to people’s blogs.
In the past year, I’ve seen several blogger collectives ramp up; web rings, or just link pages, or shared RSS feed lists. It’s clear other bloggers are trying to find solutions to this same problem, and maybe they’d prefer one a little less AI-forward.
So, come September 25, 2026, the one year anniversary of the Daily Blogroll, I’m going to stop publicizing it on social media each day. I’ll still generate it, because I and perhaps some other people find it useful, but it’s going stealth. If I can figure out a new approach, it may come back in a different form. It’s clear I need to allow readers to edit their own blog feeds, and move away from the AI stuff. I doubt people have any interest in making their own blog thumbnails or getting an OpenAI API key of their own.
Dave Winer is doing something fun with RSS, building a whole social media Twitter-clone through it. I think I’m going to start playing with it, see if I can think of a better approach to get people back into blogging and reading blogs.
Anyway, to recap: After September 25th, you’ll need to go directly to westkarana.xyz to see the Daily Blogroll. If you have your own preferred feed reader, https://westkarana.xyz/rss.xml should still give you the daily summaries.
It’s been a fun experiment, and I learned a lot. On to the next adventure.
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