Tag Archives: microblog

Home Page Changes⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Garpel Water

I’ve just changed the front page of my blog.

For the last few years most of the posts I write have not made it onto the front page, ending up in the status page instead. Now everything is going to the home page.

At the end of 2014 I started experimenting with some IndieWeb technology on my blog. In 2017 I started using the beta version of micro.blog, this meant I was posting on a wider variety of topics with lots of short status type posts.

I decided to keep these off the home page, reserving that for posts categorised as wwwd posts that were longer and about ‘Teaching, ict, and suchlike’. I added a status link to my menus along with a photos page. Now I’ve move back to everything on the home page.

As time went on my blogging has branched out to include recording the books I’ve read and films I’ve watched and other things. Some, not all yet, of my tweets and some of my replies to other blogs are now posted on this blog and auto post to twitter and the blog I am commenting on. I manually post the same photos to instagram as I do here and Bridgy brings back my comments to the blog.

I am not exactly breaking new indieweb ground her or even pushing very hard, but I am enjoying expanding my blogging, pulling in content posted elsewhere is the past and bringing my digital life a little closer together. I’ve changed the Status menu to Articles in case anyone is only interested in longer, likely educational, posts. As I blog more I see my blog as primarily for me with some added benefits from sharing.

Featured images, my own, the Garpel Water in Ayrshire an meandering stream.

Adventures in micro blogging part 1⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I signed up for the kickstarter of micro.blog, it went live earlier this week.

Micro.blog is a new social network for independent microblogs.
Start a microblog today. Easy to publish, own your content, great cross-posting.

Micro.blog

The service is very new and so far has changed and developed every day.

The idea is, you publish short posts, these are mirrored on micro.blog/yourusername via RSS. The posts can be from any RSS feed. You can get a micro.blog hosted blog at yourusername.micro.blog or use your own hosting.

The micro.blog iOS app will post to your micro.blog blog or your own WordPress blog. Or you can use your own system. There is a microblog bot that will post your posts on to Twitter too.

The difference between the hosted blog and your micro.blog/username stream is a mite confusing at the moment. I wonder if a different domain name might have helped.

Both the hosted blog and the twitter bot are paid for options. The docs make it clear that you can host your own and point to IFTTT as an alternative to the bot.

The system follows the indieweb principle of controlling your own content and sending it on to other spaces.

Replies on micro.blog to your posts are sent as webmentions to your own blog and show up as comments if you have the webmention plugin installed. I had that already to get twitter replies as comments.

My setup

I’ve added a new category here, micro. I’ve edited the blog to not have posts with this category show on the home page, they show on micro instead.

I set the micro.blog app to create posts with the status format in the micro category.

I turned off the jetpack social posting to Twitter function. I’ll manually post normal posts. I’ve set up a micro.blog bot to post to Twitter.

The service is very much a work in progress, and I’ve not really read the docs but I’ve noticed a few interesting things.

titleless

On is that the posts on micro.blog consist of descriptions with no titles. When you post form the app, you get a post on your blog without a title. A post with a title on your blog is posted as a link to micro.blog. With a post without out a title the description becomes the content of the micro.blog post.

That means you get lots of posts listed in your dashboard as ‘no title’. Since I didn’t like this I tried to auto add titles to posts without titles with a little Google-fu and some WordPress coding.

This worked out fine, except the posts on micro.blog consist of a title and a link, the tweet posted by the twitter bot is the same.

I am now looking to create a custom RSS feed without title. More googling ahead.

Alternatively I could use the code from Tweaks for micro.blog that adds dates as titles, micro.blog ignore these.

Or just learn to live with ‘no title’ posts in the dashboard.

Me on Micro.blog

Preparing for the microblog is a lot more coherent than this post if you are looking for setup advice.

I’ll post the code I’ve mentioned above at some point, it is pretty simple stuff.

Indie Microblogging⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing by Manton Reece — Kickstarter

I backed this when it launched, two days in and it seems to have got almost double its target!

Interestingly I found this via a microcast which I found via a comment here by Henrik Carlsson who collected some other microcast links. I guess this is a microblog post.