Series: Broadcasting House

Broadcasting House: on broadcasting through a “blogge,” an olde way of communicating on the electric paper

(“Blogging about blogging” is an actual crime, but I figure that in 2020 nobody remembers that any more)

These are going to be broadly notes-to-self that will have no interest to anybody, so feel free to scroll on for photos of chickens or pictures from CASTLEVANIA.

I tend to ask myself two questions about this place: is it useful, and is it interesting?

A lot of that, of course, comes down to “what is this thing even for?”

It’s a personal log, that sends signals to the outside world about my daily status and whether or not I’m alive. I would like parts of that to be automated better, but IFTTT can only do so much with WordPress, and I cannot get to grips with iOS Shortcuts. So I have to manually post stuff like a peasant in the olden days. This bothers me more than it should.

I have a particular set of wants for the isles of blogging. I want to know what you are seeing, doing, thinking. The /now page movement started by Derek Sivers is smart, but requires people to update their /now page on the regular, and, generally, they just don’t. I use a Status category on this site, which is actually linked in the footer of my emails, so, if people feel the need, they can click through to see how fucked I am on any given day. I like this to be primarily located here, even though it does pass through to social media. LTD should be the base, not someone else’s service. And, naturally, it does pass through to RSS, which is the radio set for blogs.

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.

“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.

That’s from the last post. Let me unpack this for myself a bit.

MORNING COMPUTER was erratically-published aphoristic writing nominally produced in my mornings as a writing exercise. It was amusing to me for a long time, but needs shift over time, and it began to not fit emerging requirements. These requirements included being able to signal that I was still alive, to be able to log new music I was interested in, and, bluntly, to be able to do anything I felt like. MORNING COMPUTER had an interesting set of constraints, but I started to feel them.

I wanted to return to the idea of a channel. Something where, if I am so moved, I can broadcast to you, my single reader, from when I get up to when I bail out at night. Sometimes it will be very boring, of course, like posting a picture of replacing the pond liner. But a personal log is allowed to be boring. I do hope to get time to write longer essays for myself once work calms down. The requirement, however, is being able to log my days. Before livestreaming there was “lifestreaming.” I won’t ever go full chronofile again — I experimented with that on a Tumblr instance once, and it was both oddly fascinating but also mostly stultifyingly appallingly overkill-dull.

The redoubtable Andy Affleck from WordPress Special Circumstances is taking a look at some additional fast-moving posting strategies for me. It would be nice to recover some things from the rapacious swallow of social media.

Huh. I forgot I used to do Today’s Ambient. I should bring that back.

Wondering if I shouldn’t go full channel, the way I did in the old days. Can’t quite achieve some of it as automatically as I’d like, but I should think about it. The current situation may lead some people back to presenting online in more permanent ways, outside the new high churn of social media. But I’ve been wrong before.

Looks like some people may have a lot more time to type and think. I wonder how this will go.

I had this widget I used with Twitter to signal that I’m still alive. Using IFTTT, I placed a “Do Button,” a one-tap widget, on my phone, that posted a pre-set image to Twitter with a pre-set message and a variable that stripped in the date and time. So, stirrlng from my pit in the morning, I only had to thumb one button to send the signal.

I created a second button to do the same thing at night.

It is an easy way to signal I’m up and around (or bailing out), which is one of the things internet presence is for, and, honestly, a pleasant way to bookend the days.

I cannot replicate this process in WordPress. IFTTT just refuses to do it, as does iOS Shortcuts. Andy Affleck at WordPress Special Circumstances has looked at it, and we can’t figure out why it won’t fire. But it just won’t.

This bugs me a lot more than it should.

My workaround, right now, is to take a photo, stamp it with Weathershot Pro, load it into a posting screen on the WordPress mobile app — which is now pre-set to post in the timestamp category — and fire. Not ideal, not quite what I was looking for, certainly not one-click, but it’ll do for now.

Why does this even matter to me?

For me, it’s about being able to broadcast, hence the blogchain title. This thing here that I’m talking about, the “I’m alive” signal, has professional and personal use for me. The least we can do is signal to the people we know that we’re alive, awake and vaguely around. It’s that thing I’ve talked about before, when IM systems and early Twitter were punctuated by status lights going on and people sending their “good morning” message as they signed on for the day. I realise those days are gone, of course, but I still feel like that had some utility, and it pleases me to retain that as best I can. Even if it’s only me doing it. Which, let’s face it, it usually is. I’ll be that small, broken down and obscure lighthouse sitting by the misty haunted rocks on the far edge of the Isles Of Blogging if I have to be.

Running my little experiments in the lantern room.

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.

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.