Gearing up for an entertaining fall season!
I have two websites that I haven’t needed to touch in 6 years. I just tried to update the support address from Twitter to Mastodon, only to find that the site no longer builds or deploys. The tech stack is ancient and I’m assuming some of the libraries might not be available anymore at the versions they were pinned at.
Is it easier to re-implement in a modern stack or try to patch together what is there? I think the latter, then if that fails tackle the former – but the former is more tempting than it has any right to be.
Going to give myself a challenge: on the days I’m on the train heading into the city, I will write a post or two (at least the days like today where I get a seat). Minimum 30 minutes per train ride, I should be able to get the fingers flowing (assuming motion sickness doesn’t strike — riding backwards certainly doesn’t help). Cellular iPad for the win.
In an effort to both reduce the subscriptions I’m on the hook for and streamline the apps and services I use, I had a thought to migrate from TextExpander’s snippet expansion to Alfred. I use a fraction of what TextExpander can actually do, and Alfred’s implementation is rather good (and actually a bit faster). The thing I forgot is the fact that TextExpander’s “thing” is that they are effectively cross-platform. I don’t really need it to work on Windows, but I do use TE expansion in the few apps that support it on iOS (namely Bear and Ulysses, and exclusively on the iPad).
It will be a long, long time before an app like Alfred is even allowed on iOS (and hell, even TE has to partner with apps to offer the expansion, rather than it being a system-level thing). I feel like I might need to execute a U-turn…
My last two remaining threads to Twitter are effectively cut — Reeder’s RSS capability and my dinky little app to get images from liked tweets are both shutdown (with no realistic hope of them ever returning). I was still getting value from my timeline via RSS, but not enough that I want to trudge through the official apps for it.
Just finished the new Willow series with the kids. They loved it and it was the perfect level of nostalgia-camp for those of us who were fans of the movie as kids ourselves. Seeing Warwick Davis go from a kid in the movie to an “elder” in the series was trippy. Loved the cast. Loved the irreverent references and humor. Great fun all around.
My #project tonight was to make my micro.blog site have the same theme as my main blog. Now they feel “of a piece.”
Never did much with hugo before, and while a bit finicky to setup, I have to admit it is extremely fast (especially coming from gatsby)
Now the “micro” content seems like it just lives in a separate subdomain. I’m considering tweaking the main blog back to having only the big posts.
For the most part, Twitter has been a consumption feed for me. I follow a few key individuals from a diverse set of interests – essentially a short form RSS reader with the ability to reply and engage inline. That engagement wasn’t frequent, but it felt nice to be able to participate.
Mastodon is too chaotic right now for me to discern what it will mean to me (too much of the feed is wrapped up with Twitter imploding to have its identity at the moment). Since I have set up my own domain (@mark@philpot.org) maybe it can become a place for soundboarding ideas (turn a hashtag into a blog post for example).
This post could have been put in Mastodon only (broken up in separate posts, obviously) – I haven’t decided what goes where. There are even more possibilities than there were, and I already thought I had too many options before.
Mastodon thoughts – If you are on a popular server, the federated timeline (and possibly the local timeline) are too overwhelming to be useful. My goal is to run my own server which will actually give me a useful federated timeline by running some secondary accounts that I control. That way I can have my “Home” timeline be my direct follows and my federated timeline be a bit broader but still within my direct control.
Findings from “The Great Follow Backup” (aka diversify my social follow graph)
Based on the bios in my Twitter follows, here’s a rough breakdown on where everyone is:
- pixiv (and/or fanbox)
- patreon
- github
- ko-fi
- tumblr
- youtube/twitch
- wordpress/blog (aka RSS)
- none
Many people only had a personal website (like a portfolio) that only had “resume-like” evergreen content – these people obviously considered Twitter as their microblog/social post platform. Less than 1% had a mastodon “backup” account linked.
I feel better having made the effort – if Twitter goes belly up, I can at least get back to some of the people I follow.
