I've been knitting for over a decade, now. When I first picked up sticks & string there was a budding online community it consisted primarily of the craftsy forums and a few knitting blogs. I used to visit a ridiculous number of blogs daily checking for updates. I started this blog in Spring 2007 because I was starting to feel guilty that I wasn't contributing to the community that had helped me so much.
Shortly after I started this blog Ravelry was born and I was an early adopter. I still updated things here, but I duplicated everything on my Ravelry page. I was following so many knitting blogs that I was using a subscription manager, Google Reader, to follow them. Unfortunately, Google Reader was shut down in 2013 and that is when I officially stopped following blogs. I tried other RSS readers for a while, but I didn't care for any of them. To be honest, the blogs I followed were in a spiral of attrition. Daily bloggers were becoming less frequent and many stopped blogging altogether. Some, particularly a few wordpress blogs, were hacked and the whole thing became a hassle.
I wonder how many of those bloggers still knit with any regularity.
I do.
With the advent of Ravelry blogs ceased to be the main form of online communication for knitters. I miss blogs sometimes because you got to read about the less glamorous side of knitting - lost DPNs, losing your mojo, or just being too darn busy to knit. These things get buried in Ravelry amongst talk of other non-knitting subjects. I wonder how many new knitters pick up this craft and feel like they are the only person with sloppy edges, or random pulls in their garter stitch.
In Ravelry you have to actively seek information about how long it took someone to knit a pattern (if they included that info) but if you're following someone's blog you'll watch their progress over several weeks and get a true sense of the time and work that goes into the piece.
Don't get me wrong - Ravelry is an amazing tool and a wonderful community. It's just that sometimes, I miss blogs.
The knitting community truly is special online or offline and I am blessed to be a part of it. I wonder what we'll look like in another 10 years.
