the bear at the ferry building

If it’s not one thing, it’s 12, huh? Been a bit of a rough start to the year, but here I am, finally getting into a rhythm, maybe. Been thinking about this blog a lot, what it could be, what I use it for, all that.

Over on his blog, Ventakesh Rao has been taking on the topic at some length. That is, what are blogs now that the game of blogging has been thoroughly explored? His idea of ‘elderblog’ is interesting, but I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m a practical person; I don’t know if meta-games are really what is in it for me.

Warren Ellis is blogging again, too. In his newsletter, he talked about how on twitter, there was no room to be wrong, to experiment; as a not very public figure, I can say for sure I’m wrong on twitter all the time, but I see what he means about the playfulness of it being gone. There’s a freedom that I need in the practice of writing things down and sharing them that all the socials don’t have. I turned off auto-tweeting of posts for a while, and I’m unsure if I turned it back on or not. I’m not going to go look, either.

But/and, I do have some ideas for what to do with this to keep it fresh beyond more content (so much content waiting in my queue, I haven’t even finished the Japan photos yet). I liked the slideshow idea that I did, it just needs some more work; also, I need to really invest some time in making the pictures scale with whatever screen is looking at them. They’re currently sized to be a little big on my smallest screen, the 12” macbook, but that makes them tiny and anemic on big screens. We have the technology. We can rebuild them. Or, at least, make the photos look good for everyone.

What I would really like is something that was as easy to post from as instagram, but I could either post short things from my phone or longer things from the computer when I wanted. The little photo essays I’ve been doing on insta have been doing well; it’s just that it’s still somebody else’s playground. What it needs to be is a self-hosted instance of something compatible with masto, so people can federate your stuff into their timeline easily, maybe? So when you come to my page, you get the blog format, but you sub to the feed and you get your preferred client interpretation? that might work… like a one-click install and you’re up on heroku or something.

Dunno. Just some ideas.

(I accidentally used one of the pictures meant for this; just imagine it here instead of there)

Posted by Matt on 2019-02-21 00:19:59 -0800