Yes, I read Venkat’s Text Renaissance piece, which would have been more effective if the notation tool he talks up didn’t have the most inept and incoherent onboarding video I’ve seen in months. Buy a fucking notebook.
I also went back and looked at micro.blog, which I signed up for years ago, and then forgot about. Really clever: you click on the big New Post button and you get a page that says “You can reply inside Micro.blog, but you should post to your own microblog site and let Micro.blog add your posts to the timeline.” Wow. Okay. Clearly I forgot what this was. (No crit of microblog – that’s on me.) So I went to the help system to see how it connects to WordPress, and it requires me to insert code into my WordPress install, which, in 2020, is entirely past my personal non-trivial level. I guess IndieWeb is still for devoted hobbyists rather than, you know, just people.
WordPress isn’t always simple. Ghost is probably a little simpler? Blot.im is intelligently basic — if I hadn’t required just a little more functionality, LTD would be on Blot.
I feel like Blogger was for people, in large part?
A text renaissance would be nice — and has been announced every few years since forever, even in the dominant days of physical print; “Look, we’re all articles and no photo shoots!” — but isn’t strictly my interest, weirdly. A blog that was just people photographing their local sky every day would have me tuning in every day. I use RSS Bridge to grab Instagram accounts and shove them into my feed reader of choice (Feedbin). I’m not the only one who posts photos on their blog first and then allows certain of them to be syndicated out to Instagram using RSS and Buffer.
Manfred Macx, mate: “He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.” Blogs as status signals. Personal photos as part of the channel. “Channel” is the important signifier, I suspect. “Personal publishing” can mean a multiplicity of things, and should. And it probably starts with owning or at least significantly renting your own transmitter and owning all the master tapes.