• Watching

    Movie time. Been waiting for this one! 🎬

    Sunday July 30, 2023
  • Travel

    ,

    Social media

    ,

    Blogging

    ,

    Article

    Back from the holidays, more website tinkering ensues!

    Right before heading to summer holidays in June, I launched a new version of this website.

    During the holiday, I didn’t do much else than enjoy the vacation views & feels and post some stories and photos on Instagram from the trip. Didn’t even bring my laptop with me, holiday well spent!

    Having said that, I feel excited to get back to tinkering with this blog again. Unlike social media channels where you have limited options on “making it yours”, on personal websites, the sky is the limit. It’s fun being able to make this thing whatever I want it to be.

    Oh, where did we travel?

    In addition to travels in Finland (where I’m from), we went to Northern Italy, near a city called Bolzano and from there, continued to Santorini, Greece. First mountain views with nice 20-25 Celsius weather, then full on sunshine, 30 Celsius and those beautiful Santorini views. It was great and I miss those places already!

    Ok, but about that blog / website tinkering topic. Here’s what’s been happening.

    Six photos collage from trip to Italy and Greece.
    Northern Italy and Santorini, I miss you already!

    More layout changes

    I started building this website on a fork of Tiny Theme in June. After that, this has evolved on a theme of it’s own. I’ll probably make a new repository out of this at some point and write it again from scratch at some point. But for now, the code itself is living on the fork branch.

    When viewing the site on larger screens, it now has a left sidebar and the main content area on right. On mobile, it’s the same one column view it used to be.

    There are also some subtle new things like the subscribe to email updates and RSS feed buttons on homesite. I also added a verified checkmark icon next to my name on site title. If you’d like to add it to your personal blog, Andy Bell got you covered.

    Subscribing to blog updates, revisited

    I struggled quite a bit on the question of “how does one want to follow updates from a blog”. Especially when the blog has both micro posts (which get published often) and long form content (like this article).

    I first thought of a monthly newsletter option, then a weekly version of it. But it felt strange for me to be sending a collection of all the posts from a given time frame. I wouldn’t want to subscribe via email to anyone’s Twitter/Threads/Mastodon feed either, so why would this feel any different?

    For more regular updates, RSS feels like a better option. Or following the blog on Fediverse (seeing all the post updates from a social media channel of user’s choice, Mastodon for example).

    What I ended up with are these three options:

    • Sending long form articles (and only those) via email as soon as they get published. You can subscribe here.
    • Full feed (with long and short posts) are available via RSS.
    • Following on Fediverse by searching @juha@juhaliikala.com (copy-paste that to Mastodon search and you follow this blog via that channel)

    I also thought about sending real time blog notification via Slack / Telegram, etc. but didn’t yet implement any of that. Let’s see if I will.

    More blogging

    Back in 2010, I used write one or two article per week and publish them. Fast forward to this day and I really struggle to write and publish once a month (if even that!). Why is that?

    There are many things I could point my finger at and cast blame: Too busy at work and life, too many distractions (mostly all the social media channels, news etc.), too much this and that. But yeah, it is what it is. Life is much more hectic than it used to be back then.

    To that end, I’d still like to at least try my best to publish here on a biweekly basis, if possible. If not, oh well.. it gets out when it gets out, I guess. My website, my rules and all that 🤪.

    The story continues..

    Speaking of hectic life, I’m already late from my daily(ish) workout session, so need to run now.

    But hopefully will see you soon again here on blog. Until the next time! 👋

    Saturday July 29, 2023
  • Made some minor(ish) design tweaks to the blog today. New background from Santorini trip, of course! 😄 Also, dropped the newsletter subscribe option for now. I personally feel it doesn’t make much sense to send these (mostly) microblog type of posts via email (even if gathered in weekly emails). RSS feels like a better channel for those imho.

    I wonder how others feel about this? Do you subscibe to email updates if the posts are mostly microblog type of posts?

    Saturday July 22, 2023
  • Well it was fun while it lasted. As you may have heard, Meta has blocked EU users from accessing Threads. I noticed I wasn’t able to publish, comment or do pretty much anything else than browse the main feed in the app someday last week. No idea when the app will be usable for us EU mortals again.. :(

    Monday July 17, 2023
  • Thank you for the shiny stickers @manton! They arrived to mailbox while we were on our summer holiday trip. Just opened the envelope yesterday. 😊

    Monday July 17, 2023
  • Threads by Instagram is not available in Europe (at least for now)? At least I don’t see it in Finnish appstore. For someone who can try it, is it ActivityPub compatible? Can I use it with micro.blog somehow (follow people, respond to threads, etc.? 🤔

    Thursday July 6, 2023
  • Curious if the Apple’s upcoming Journal app will turn our to be something that would make me keep a personal journal. Micro.blog is great for public journaling, but I’ve never really used an app for private journaling. Tbh, it’s been ages since I’ve had any kind of private journal. 😄

    Sunday June 11, 2023
  • Something going on with Mastodon cross-posting from micro.blog. Previous few entries never made to Mastodon for some reason. Testing out once more if disconnecting / reconnecting auth helped. 🤞

    Saturday May 13, 2023
  • Watching

    Been really enjoying Silo (Apple TV+) so far. Certainly a positive surprise! 8/10 from me. 📺

    Saturday May 13, 2023
  • Travel

    ,

    Travel photos

    Singapore pooltime! 😍🇸🇬 It’s been 4 years since our last visit. Awesome to be back! 😊 Next up, Bali 🌴

    #travel #singapore #indonesia #bali 🗺️

    Poolside chilling in Singapore Supertree Grove in Singapore Marina Bay Sands in late evening
    Tuesday March 21, 2023
  • Not sure if the micro.blog landing page has looked the way it does for a long time, but I really like it! Love the clean look and the way it highlights the best parts of using the platform. Great work @manton et al. 👏👏

    Thursday January 19, 2023
  • Still wrapping my head around the “best practice” on how to use my main Mastodon account and this blog’s “account” (@juha@juhaliikala.com) side by side. For now, I think I’ll just boost posts that I’d also like to share via my main account and keep my fingers crossed that the possible comments on the (boosted) post appear hear on this blog (and micro.blog) too. I guess that’s one way to go about it? :)

    Monday January 16, 2023
  • Travel

    ,

    Travel photos

    Posting a few nice shots from Lofoten (Norway) road trip (few years ago) to check if micro.blog CDN settings have taken effect 😄🤞🗺️

    Road to the mountains, somewhere near the Lofoten islands, Norway Fishing village, somewhere near the Lofoten islands, Norway Lake and a Fishing village, somewhere near the Lofoten islands, Norway
    Thursday January 12, 2023
  • Suomeksi

    Aiempaan viestiin liittyen, omalta micro.blog seurantalistalta löytyi ainoastaan @tkoola Suomesta. Ehkäpä meitä muitakin löytyy micro.blogista? Oli miten oli, ajatus olisi välillä jakaa täällä jotain suomeksikin, tai viritellä cross-postausta micro.blogista esim. Mastodonin tai Linkkarin puolelle, kun tulee jotain erityisesti suomeksi jaettavaa. Kassotaan!

    Tuesday January 10, 2023
  • Blogging

    Does anyone run their micro.blog in some other language than English? I’m considering creating another micro.blog which I’d use for Finnish content specifically. There are cases where blogging in my native language would make sense (and sharing those post to social channels which I use in Finnish). Would be cool to hear some experiences if some of you’ve done something similar! :)

    Sunday January 8, 2023