I heard about xLog, an open-source blog community, a while ago due to the promotion by the author of RSSHub. However, I have always agreed with the idea that "the death of a blog is not the lack of updates, but the inability to access it." Since xLog is still a relatively new thing, I have not had the intention to use it.
Origin#
But today, I listened to a conversation between No.27 and Qwerty Learner about technical optimization, product operation, and front-end insights, and I thought it was very well presented. I noticed that they published it on the xLog platform. So I had a change of heart and decided to give it a try, considering it as a backup. There are a few points worth mentioning about the user experience:
Actual Experience#
- As advertised, it is very easy to get started. After connecting my web3 wallet and email, I was able to set up a blog by importing my existing markdown files. I think it's great.
- The provided editor is a nice addition for me because I am used to editing in vscode.
- AI-powered summaries. I still prefer to write summaries manually. But it seems that xLog cannot recognize my existing
excerpt:. However, it does support other attributes such asdate:,tags:, andtitle:. - Web3. Compared to other blog communities, web3 is a major feature of xLog. This concept has been around for a while, but it is still relatively new to me. This was my first time encountering this aspect while using xLog. I find many of the concepts quite interesting, and I think I should take the time to understand how it is implemented.
- Community. Being a community means that more people may see my posts. They say that blogging is for oneself, but it's also nice to have more people see my thoughts. However, I don't want to fall into a situation where I become too focused on metrics like page views and likes, and lose sight of the original intention of writing a blog (I think I will write a post to reflect on this). That would be a loss.
Conclusion#
My previous process for writing a blog was usually like this:
- Have thoughts and record them locally.
- When I have free time, I select some thoughts from the local storage that can be turned into blog posts. I make some modifications (polishing, anonymizing) and publish them on euds63.github.io.
But now, if I want to update on EuDs, I would need an additional step.
3. Manually import it to xLog.
The first two steps cannot be eliminated. And I still consider euds63.github.io as the main hosting platform for my blog. As for the third step, although the workload is not too large, it is still a bit troublesome. So my current idea is to merge the third step with the second step. I wonder if there are any relevant APIs available.