Category: jotter

Poking at SoundCloud in between clearing things off my screen. Wow, I haven’t looked at that in a while. I used to check my Stream page every morning to see what was new, and I guess I fell out of that habit. And, it turns out, haven’t updated my follows or profile in forever. I really need to clear that out soon, at the same time as I clear out my twitter lists, for the day when the internet has something to talk about that isn’t The Current Thing.

I keep a very basic wordpress.com instance that is a log of many of my actions on the web – pinned links, likes, posts and reposts, that sort of thing. When I like a track on SoundCloud, the track embeds in that simple instance, a playable element in the trail of clicks the site collects. This more sophisticated and advanced WordPress hosting system arranged by WordPress Special Circumstances resists a lot of that jerry-rigged automation: I suspect simply because it is more secure. This bugged me a little at first. And then it made me realise that it’s not a bad thing. It makes me have to think and act a little bit more in order to put things into this log. I’m leaning into it.

Not as much, of course, as my companions on the Isles of Blogging who do well-considered weeknotes or carefully constructed daily-ish single posts. Because I’m me, and because somebody has to show those people how to not do it. But blasting out a trail of my half-awake clicks is, I suspect, not how to do it any more. Going full-channel requires someone to act as a director of programming, after all.

Now I just need a programming guide. Radio Times.

So my WordPress iOS app is now set to post to the category timestamp by default. I take a photo, load it into a new WordPress post on the app (which takes an extra tap these days, as I have to select the “image” block), and press Send. Not quite seamless, not quite fast enough, but it does the job of sending an “I’m alive” signal into the ether first thing in the day. The image doesn’t crosspost to Twitter any more, which, again, is not ideal for my purposes. But, if that doesn’t get fixed or worked around, then I guess Twitter doesn’t want me crossposting images from WordPress to Twitter any more, and that’s a clear enough signal that my distancing from social media displeases social media and I should just fuck off for good.

This is actually kind of interesting to me. Facebook long ago began depreciating posts that don’t originate from inside Facebook, making sure fewer people see them. If Twitter is now reaching the point where it only wants you to see images that are posted from inside Twitter… well, that’s an interesting corner to turn, isn’t it?

With work dropping out of 1000mphclub speeds and giving me a little space to think, I turn again to this blogchain. Because, as a commercial writer, I need some kind of regular pulse on the internets, but, as a fair facsimile of a human being, I need to live in my own private way and outside social media. And LTD is the ongoing development of a personal solution to these issues.

Interesting post on WPtavern by Justin Tadlock:

“More than anything, I want personal websites to be more personal.

“We’re still in a somewhat frustrating transitional period where WordPress is not even halfway to becoming the platform that it will be. We are still beholden to our themes, though less so than before.

“Whether it is a digital garden, a plain ol’ blog, or some new thing we do not have a term for yet, we will all be able to put our unique spin on our personal spaces. It is part of the web that we lost in the last couple of decades with the emergence of the CMS. “

(Note that I’m bolding quotes now because I don’t like the blockquote style on this theme and haven’t had the time to figure out how to rewrite it yet.)

While I personally like the chronological timeline, he also makes the point that a personal site doesn’t have to be that, which may be a useful thought for someone out there who hasn’t gone full wiki directory (hello, Kicks Condor, I can see you).

I realise, of course, that nobody anywhere wants to look at photos of my food. But it does help me remember to eat. Personal log, right? Off I go into the tall weeds of the internet, never to be seen again…

In another month, I’ll have enough wall space to break out another whiteboard and do some visual planning on how this space works. It will not look like the picture on this blog post, which hurts me to look at.