Juha Liikala logo Juha Liikala

Two blogs, two languages

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? Guess we’ll just have to try and see!

Anyway, both now use Hyde theme (or a variation of it), the other one runs on top of Micro.blog and Hugo (actually, the micro.blog version uses my own custom theme), the other’s build on top of Eleventy. If you’re ever curious to try the same, micro.blog’s variation of Hyde can be found here and the eleventy version can be found here.

The idea is not to publish the exact same content in both English and Finnish. Rather, I’ll probably end up writing “independently” on both blogs, depending on the topic and the gut feeling of where this particular post belongs.

Either way, it’s way overdue for me to actually start blogging in my native language. Let’s just do it. No more analysis paralysis on that then! 😁

Got my custom micro.blog theme in good speed this weekend, aye! See it in action at https://blog.juhaliikala.com/ . Still ton of things to tweak, improve and implement, but eventually, the idea is to publish this as a micro.blog theme/plugin that others can use in their micro.blog blogs too 😊 Early feedback much appreciated! 🙏

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”?

Aaand back to the “real human” type of profile picture again, after rockin the cartoon avatar for a while. In this age of AI generated pictures, having a “real human face” as the profile image feels nicer I guess 😄

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 guess only time will tell. 🤷🏻

Soooo.. Threads just launched their web version, cool. Unless you’re in EU region, which I am. Can’t use the app, can’t use the web. Twitter is a mess, left ages ago. STILL no Bluesky invite either (although I joined waiting list last year). Truly feeling like a second class citizen here! 🥲

Well, at least micro.blog works (and Mastodon!) 🤪