I sometimes find myself cancelling my Micro.blog subscription on a whim when I start thinking about blogging on a new platform (sorry @manton! 😅). But after each time, I find myself coming back. Why? There just ain’t a publishing platform out there that makes the barrier of publishing this easy. Plus, of course as there’s a backlog of previous posts already, you avoid the horror of staring at your fancy new blog with just one blog post published.
Having said that, there is a completely new blog design coming soon (on micro.blog). Just takes a while for me to get all the pixels in the right order, before I’m happy with it. 😁
I’m a bit late to the party (here on this blog), but I just want to take a moment to congratulate @dave for the incredible milestone of blogging non-stop for the past 30 years! There are very few (if any!) bloggers who have been doing this for as long as that. Even the Wayback Machine doesn’t have records of those first years (as it was started in 1996 and Dave’s blog has been around from ‘94!) @kottke.org and @zeldman.com might come close!
So, congratulations are certainly in order! Hat tip to you, sir! 🥳
In my endless quest of “trying out new blogging things”, I lured myself into a new experiment for this weekend: What if I keep my existing (in english) Micro.blog site where it is at micro.juhaliikala.com, but also start a Finnish variation of the site on a separate domain at juhaliikala.fi. Would that fly? In other words; will I end up writing on both sites for a longer run, or is one or other going to get buried as a failed experiment?
So, as we now have three main ways for subscribing to a blog/publication; email newsletter, RSS and ActivityPub (handle), which will win? Some blogs even add a fourth way: Subscribing via WhatsApp / Telegram / Etc. Will RSS and ActivityPub subscribing continue being marginal use case and email still rules? I have no idea, but I think about this a lot.
I feel ActivityPub (especially in it’s current form) has a bit similar problem that RSS does, non-techical users just don’t use them for subscribing. It’s been all about newsletters for so long, that not sure if that mental model will change easily.
As a blogger, do you intend to support several different ways of subscribing (to your blog)? Or, do you plan to just promote one primary way of subscribing and maybe offer the other ways of subscribing in “the fine details”?
I miss those early days when most people I know from blogging, web projects, online biz and related endeavours were on Twitter. Both in Finland and globally. It was so easy to connect and stay connected with everyone.
Fast forward to today, and we are all scattered across various social networks online. Mastodon, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, Tumblr, Bluesky, micro.blog.. and yes, X.
Ugh. Too many places to keep track of, let alone stay active on. ActivityPub certainly is a step in the right direction in this context, but will it ever get adopted widely enough to “solve” this problem?
I've been surprisingly happy in the way this site came together.
However, like it happens nearly every time after I've launched a new thing, this time was no different: I’ve been already thinking about doing it again from a scratch.
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.
Well, I did it again. Started a new blog, that is.
Oh wait, that’s not entirely true. It ain’t new, as I’ve used it on and off for micro blogging. But I haven’t used it for longer posts like this one. Oh, and it has fresh coat of paint too!
The site runs on micro.blog, a blogging platform that also has elements of social networking built in. In addition to the micro.blog community itself, it also connects with Fediverse. And you can easily cross-publish to other social networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium and more.
Now that I’ve moved around some “furniture”, this place feels more like home. There are few things I’d like to mention about the “making of” this site.
This feels good. I think I should hang out here more. Picture by @timmossholder
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! :)
My first Micro Monday shout-out goes to @amit who’s blog amitgawande.com I just stumbled upon recently. Amit sure has been blogging for a while! Starting from 2005, that’s no small feat! 😄 Amit is also responsible for the beautiful theme I started using on my blog (the same one he uses for his - Paper theme). Minimally beautiful!
Regarding discovering new (micro) blogs, I wonder if there’s a way to see if anyone I follow on Twitter has a blog here? Is there a plug-in or something for that @manton? 😊
After a brief sidetracking on WordPress, I switched my blogging efforts back to micro.blog. WP was fine (it always is), but the ease of publishing via micro.blog just felt like a better road to take right now. Let’s see how this goes! :)
I’ve been mulling over the thought of building and selling a few website / blogging themes this year. Just not 100% decided on to which “platform”. Probably Ghost or Eleventy, or why not a micro.blog theme even? WordPress could be too, but the latest full site editing / block theme stuff feels like there’s too many moving parts to take into account. Would want to keep things as simple as possible.
Don’t recall if I’ve seen commercial Eleventy themes before though. So Ghost then.. perhaps? At least Ghost has a theme marketplace.
Just thinking out loud here I guess. Let’s see what I manage to cook up (if anything at all)! :)
