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The Retrocomputing Blog is now live! Thanks to our volunteer bloggers for committing to the blog and Automattic Inc. for hosting it, we have been able to launch our very own blog!

We have some guidelines for blog posts, which should be read by all potential contributors to the blog. If you want to write a post for the blog (and are not a regular contributor), please let one of the site moderators know, either in chat or by replying to this question.

If you want to contribute to the blog, please set the email address in your preferences to the address you would like to use for WordPress, then post an answer to this question (not to the original proposal) explaining what / why you want to post. We might not accept new bloggers immediately, so keep checking your Stack Exchange inbox.

The blog, as well as providing extremely useful information and Making the Internet a Better Place™, will also serve to publicise our site – provided that high quality content is posted on it, and backlinks are placed where relevant.

If you have just finished researching for a detailed answer and are burning to share the other stuff you found out along the way, keep all those tabs open: the blog is a brilliant opportunity for you to do so. If you are working on a project with retro hardware, you can meticulously document every step of the way. Many people will find it interesting and, who knows? Somebody else might be doing something similar and find it useful too.

I hope this blog will play a major part in preserving the rapidly diminishing retrocomputing knowledge, and might eventually become a major source of information for answers on the site. If everybody contributes one high-quality article to the blog – describing their experiences, search for knowledge or hardware project – we will have a fantastically vast wealth of information for everybody to share and enjoy.

With your help, we can once again go above and beyond in making the internet a better place.

Disclaimer: The Retrocomputing Blog is not in any way affiliated with Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network.

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  • 1
    Thanks for getting this started! I'm hoping to have a post ready by this weekend.
    – Aaron
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 13:26
  • 3
    @Aaron I would've got it done sooner, had I not spent three days reviewing, editing, tweaking, rewriting etc. this post. (That's why I probably won't be blogging much.)
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 13:43
  • My only suggestion so far would be to add an RSS Feed icon on the page somewhere as readers not familiar with WordPress might not realize it automatically generates a feed at "<blogurl>/feed". See "How to Promote your RSS Feed" in the following WordPress guide: wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/…
    – mnem
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 20:22
  • @mnem It highlights the feed icon in the browser when you navigate to the page, but ok. You might be interested to know that we've been testing out a blog feed-bot in the moderator chatroom.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 11, 2016 at 7:50
  • @wizzwizz4 Feed icon in the browser? Isn't that browser-specific? There's no feed icon displayed in Firefox, for example. At least not by default.
    – mnem
    Commented Aug 11, 2016 at 12:15
  • @mnem I don't have one in my Firefox either... I'm sure I used to... Maybe it isn't there by default, but there's only one menu-space in the blog.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 11, 2016 at 13:27
  • @wizzwizz4 Normally you'd see it in the header or a sidebar somewhere along with buttons to share on Twitter, Facebook, etc, but I'm not a web designer, merely a heavy feed consumer, so I'll leave layout decisions up to the experts. I just want to see the thing get good use, and for blogs, nothing keeps them coming back like subscribing to the RSS feed.
    – mnem
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 13:27
  • @mnem There is only one space for a menu for some reason. I'll try something...
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 13:52
  • @mnem Good enough?
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 13:56
  • @wizzwizz4 Looks good. The less friction between a potential reader stumbling on a relevant blog post through search or what have you and subscribing to the RSS feed, the better. :)
    – mnem
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 15:05
  • It's three and a half years later. did this thing die on the vine? Can it be resurrected? FD: I'm a Retro lightweight. I remember some things about the DEC PDP-1 through PDP-10 computers, and I'm somewhat interested in some Retro questions that are outside my knowledge.
    – Walter Mitty
    Commented Dec 24, 2019 at 14:18
  • @WalterMitty Yes, and hopefully. Head over to The BBS and we can talk about it.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Dec 24, 2019 at 14:44

2 Answers 2

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If this blog supports ways of sharing content from other sites, then RSS feeds from Hackaday and even personal blogs (I've got a "retro" section on my own blog) are easy ways to aggregate related material.

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  • There is a Reblog feature on Wordpress... We could use that.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 8:10
  • You could guest-post on our blog if you like. That way you can get extra publicity for your blog while helping us populate ours.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 8:14
  • Alas, I blog less and less these days, and retro development and vintage repair gets only the lowest priority access to my pool of time these days.
    – user12
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 12:16
  • That's a shame. Which of your existing posts do you think would be good on our blog? (Your retro-challenges seem good.)
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 12:28
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    If WordPress groks RSS, then anything from clevermonkey.org/categories/#retro-computing would make good filler. Good enough to wrap your fish and chips in, anyway.
    – user12
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 20:59
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Good work getting this setup wizzwizz4. I'll get working on a post about my new (old) PC that's taken up so much of my time recently!

Do we have any pixel artists in our SE community who could start working on a retro logo for the blog? Be cool to get a nice custom theme.

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  • 2
    Unfortunately I can't seem to get a custom theme installed onto the server. Customising the logo might be possible though.
    – wizzwizz4 Mod
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 9:34
  • 1
    I think I read somewhere that we can't get a custom theme until we've graduated out of beta.
    – Omar and Lorraine
    Commented Nov 30, 2017 at 15:45

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