Category: Uncategorized

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Comparing blogging systems

A few days back I wrote about the IndieWeb and a blogging system called micro.blog.

I’ve been testing micro.blog at the following site: bloftin2.micro.blog for several weeks now. I just enjoy seeing how things work.

So looking at the two. Micro.blog is a small company. It is one developer and three other people. They have a high commitment to keeping their service free of scumbags. I like that. Here’s a list of other things I like about it:

  • Free 10 day trial, after which your blog goes away but your retain an account on which you can post and read your timeline.
  • The melding of a blogging system with a Twitter-like timeline is clever.
  • Removal of some of the traditional social media concepts, like #s and @s, removes some of the main ways people abuse social media. Yes, it also removes a tool for finding like-minded people and interesting things, but let’s face it, that stuff is abused so much by would-be influencers. I don’t think it’s a great loss.
  • The blog page have no way to comment. To comment, you must be a member, and you do it from your timeline. Again – a tool for abuse by spammers is removed.
  • The iPhone app is very simple. The WordPress app is good too, but with micro.blog being a bit more bare-bones, it is just very very simple. To me, simplicity is the key to getting more people to do something.
  • Login via email. That’s right. No damned password to remember.
  • Nice, simple themes. It is so hard to find a WordPress theme these days that is just a simple wide space for text and video and a simple sidebar. There’s no sidebar in micro.blog. Just a blog. I love that. It focuses on your writing/video/images.

Now micro.blog isn’t the tool for everything. This blog, for example, kind of functions as my personal web portal. It is my home base.  I run my own installation of WordPress on web hosting account with DreamHost.com. I have done this for many years now.

The biggest issue in using micro.blog is the same thing that plagues anything on the web that isn’t in one of the big social media silos. Visibility. It will be interesting to see how things develop. For now I have it set up to cross post all my stuff to my Twitter account.

I guess my point is that when you are use to seeing all the “likes” and comments when you post something, it is kind of an adjustment using a system where there are no “likes”, no retweets, and to engage with someone you must actually have an account and be part of an actual conversation.

In summary – micro.blog just makes blogging very easy. Whatever system you use, I think that having your own domain name and not having your stuff all on FB or Twitter or IG or Tiktok is the main thing. Own your shit. Don’t give it away.

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D&D

Going to try to post daily for the rest of the year, even if it is just a few words and a picture. Today is D&D day. We’ve been playing on an almost weekly basis for about 3 months. It is nice to have a pastime I share with my wife, and also one that doesn’t involve smashing a skateboard into my shins.

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the IndieWeb

This will be the 874th post on this blog. I’ve been doing this for many years now. I’m not exactly sure why. I do enjoy it. I am sort of compelled. I only have a few readers, but that is enough. For some reason blogging has always spoken to me.

A few times a year I do a quick search for new blogging platforms. I’m generally very happy with this site, which runs on WordPress, on server space I have rented from DreamHost.com for many years now.

As WordPress has evolved it has become more difficult for someone like me to modify the themes available. They are just a lot more complex than they were back in 2006. I also very much don’t like the new themes that are available. As you, dear readers, may have notices, I like a very clean site. I want my words easy to read, without a bunch of junk all over the place. It seems I am very much in the minority on this. Oh well.

This year I came upon micro.blog, a site and system created by an old coworker named Manton Reece. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks, and I have to say it’s a nice system. This description will do a better job than I can of explaining it.

All of this led me to this concept/movement/thing called IndieWeb. In short, it is the notion of at least to some extent un-entangling from the social media sites and massive companies, or at least using them with a bit more thought while having your own thing going and owning your own data and content. Stuff that I feel like has been brewing in my mind for a while, and maybe yours too. Or maybe not. Who knows?

I’m not kidding myself. I don’t think this is going to change the internet habits of the masses, but I do think it offers and alternative way of thinking about online creative activities (like blogging) and life-on-the-internet in general.

Looking over many of the principles found on IndieWeb, it strikes me that I have been doing many of them for a long time. That’s probably a result of when I started creating web pages and just being involved in all this. That would be about 1994. There was no social media or big silos back then, so for the most part you needed your own domain name and hosting account to do anything. So all of that is normal to me. When I started my old skateboard trick tips video site, I had to host the tiny videos and pay  for the very expensive bandwidth because there was no Youtube back then. No inexpensive or free way of hosting video. As a consequence, though I’ve got a youtube account and have a lot of video there, it has always rubbed me the wrong way to give my content to them, in exchange for free hosting, to build their business and not mine. In fact, for the last few years I’ve actually used a pay account with Vimeo for the most part to host my videos. I realize not everyone can pay, but I can, and for me it is worth it. As a paying customer, I feel like I have a bit more power in the relationship than I do with Youtube.

Anyway, I think this is the kind of next-level information literacy stuff that people need to think about.

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Miniatures

It’s been a hot summer thus far (yeah, no kidding, it’s Texas for God’s sake).

I have not been motivated to skate very much in the heat. I’d rather not go out and just feel miserable afterward. So I’ve been painting some D&D miniatures. I’m not great at it, but not horrible. One nice thing about being an adult, that’s a change from when I did it as a teenager, is that I an afford the box of paints that has pretty much every color. The paints are nicer now too.

I am playing in a D&D campaign. The monster — I like to just find weird monsters to use as aliens and alien monsters in my Traveller campaign. This is an image of the monster in process. The wizard is finished.

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Hawk

As any skateboarder with an internet connection now knows, Tony Hawk broke his femur last week. Really nasty break. He was in Austin a few days later, on crutches, with hardware in his leg, for the first showing of the new documentary about his life in skating at South by Southwest.

This morning on his Hawk vs Wolf video/podcast he and Jason Ellis talk about it.

It is really something to see Hawk talk about this injury. Clearly it was horrible, and he has the look of a man who already understood the effects of aging on his skating, and now understands it even more. But what is really moving is hearing him essentially say that (besides just wanting to walk normally again) he just wants to skate. That desire just to skate, regardless the so-called level of his skating. Obviously if Tony is skating at about 10% his peak, that is about 1000% for everyone else, but the point is the same. All of us just want to skate. It is very humanizing to see this legendary skater really not knowing what the future of his skating looks like, but just wanting to skate.

 

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First session of 2022

First session of the year, since the weather turned to crap in November 2021. The first session of the new year is always rough, as it take about 1 or maybe 2 sessions to get my feet back under me. Legs are always a little weaker after winter, and I’m just a bit rusty in general. Was good to be back on my board and I’m looking forward to a good year of skating.

Anyway, I was a little slow today, a little afraid of little rocks, and just generally getting the feel for my board again.

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Cyberpunk

The other night I watched this documentary, No Maps for These Territories. It’s an interview with William Gibson, who pretty much invented the Cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction. There were some other author involved, but after watching this documentary and reflecting on my own readings of Gibson’s Burning Chrome anthology and his Sprawl Trilogy, I realized that in my mind that stuff IS cyberpunk. Gibson’s vision is it.

Anything else I’ve read that had the “cyberpunk” label attached has been at least a little disappointing. I think Gibson’s vision is so rich and so deep that for anyone else to really do what he did, well, they’d just be seen as copying him.

One of the best histories of the genesis of cyberpunk appears in Victoria Blake’s introduction to Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution, and Revolution.

The only thing I’ve seen that really visually looks like Cyberpunk is Blade Runner. Gibson has said that he was writing Neuromancer when Blade Runner came out, and he was afraid people would think he simply copied Ridley Scott. Apparently the more recent Netflix series Altered Carbon takes its visual style from Blade Runner. You can’t overemphasize the impact of Blade Runner. Everything else I’ve seen, including the film adaptation of Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic, look like over the top Duran Duran videos.

Not sure where I’m going with this. To sum up. I like the novels of William Gibson, I like Blade Runner, I will check out Altered Carbon.