Tag: microblogging

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I’ve been an avid reader since I was a little kid, but very much not a tracker of things I read. In 6th grade I could have gotten some little prizes for reading a lot, if I’d been willing to go to the trouble of documenting the things I read, but I seriously could not be bothered to do so.

Very occasionally though, I miss having a record of things I’ve read, such as when somebody asks me, “Read any good books lately?”

I never signed up for Goodreads, and was glad I had not when they got bought. (Letting large corporations use my data to improve their bottom line bugs me on principle.) But just now I learned about IndieBookClub, which (like micro.blog) provides an interface for posting—in this case your reading activity—to your own website.

As a non-tracker from way back, I’m probably not likely to become a tracker just because there’s a new cool tool for tracking, but you never know.

Edited to add: I have posted my first book.

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My brother complained that the two posts I put up earlier this morning (where I shared links to interesting articles) amounted to clickbait. I deny it categorically. This is actually a Twitter issue.

As evidence, let me point out that Micro.blog gets it right, that Facebook has the link right there, and so does Google+. Of course my RSS feed includes the link.

For reasons I can only guess at, Twitter is stripping the link out of the post before sharing it.

Given that he is quick to criticize Twitter for its many similar misfeatures, I was a bit surprised that Steven aimed his criticisms at me rather than at Twitter in this case.

Still, there’s a silver lining. I had already added the link to my microblog at micro.blog to the “social media” menu at the bottom of the page, but writing this post prompted me to notice that I hadn’t gotten it added to the list of social media links on my Contact page. Fixed.

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In part of my continuing preparation for using Manton Reece’s micro.blog stuff, I went ahead and installed the Webmentions plugin for WordPress on this site.

So, if you use Webmention (whether on a WordPress blog or some other kind of site), you should get notified when I link to your stuff, and I should get notified when you link to my stuff.

This will be so much better than having these discussions on some lame blend of blog comments, Facebook, and Twitter.

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I’m moderately active on Twitter and Facebook. I post photos on both Flickr and Instagram. I try to keep my profile reasonably up to date on LinkedIn. I even use Google Plus. I hate all these things.

(Actually, I don’t hate Flickr—it’s pretty good.)

There are a lot of things I hate about them, beginning with big corporations deciding which ads appear next to my words (not to mention keeping the money from those ads). I also hate the way they keep making their services worse (the needs of the venture capitalists outweigh the needs of the users). But the worst thing is: I can’t find stuff I remember writing!

“Oh, yeah—I put that one on Facebook.”

“Oh, yeah—that one was a tweet.”

“Oh, maybe I wrote that back when I had my LiveJournal going?”

My partial solution, for a while now, has been to put almost everything—all but the shortest bits—on my own blog. Then I link back to them on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. That’s still unsatisfactory in several ways, but especially for those short bits—tweets and Facebook posts—that don’t get their own blog entries.

There’s no good solution. My blogging software supports “asides” or “status” posts which are supposed to be for things like Twitter or Facebook posts. I used those briefly, and didn’t like it. Those little posts cluttered up the main flow of my blog. Worse, different blog themes displayed them differently. (Maybe I’ll try posting an “aside” or a “status” again after this post, and see if they’re better now.)

I even considered setting up a Diaspora node for a while, and then arranging to have things I posted there flow out to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Then at least everything I posted would be just one of two places (my website and my Diaspora node). That turned out to be too much work.

Just yesterday I ran across something that may go some way toward solving this problem: Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing, which I have backed on Kickstarter (video below).

I don’t yet know if it will solve my problems, but I’ll try it out and see if it works.

One key feature of the Indie Microblogging thing that makes me think it might be satisfactory is that it’s built on RSS. (The fact that it provides RSS feeds is the reason I don’t hate Flickr, and the fact that they don’t is a big piece of what’s wrong with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.)

Anyway, check out Indie Microblogging, and see if it’s something of interest to you, too:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manton/indie-microblogging-owning-your-short-form-writing/