Query: mothership found 9 results
Wow, February went whizzing by. Managed to do something slightly clever with the subscription emails for Eat This Newsletter, and it paid off, at least this once. Mastodon is still fun and may be proving useful. Hard to say, until I polish up my thing for looking at logs.
It has been an interesting month, not least because on 11 November I pledged to be more alive to recording and reviewing my activities. This is the result, a few days late. Interesting too because I was away for 10 days, attending the memorial service for my PhD supervisor, swanning around (very) old haunts and spending time with my family. A good break.
Interest in the IndieWeb appears to have upticked ever so slightly over the past couple of weeks, which may be why I've noticed so many more posts about how and why people are posting to their own sites and their various social presences. I meant to weigh in much sooner on some of them.
I have immense respect for all the people involved in the IndieWeb who devote their time and expertise to helping people like me make use of their efforts. I also know that it can be a frustrating experience, and not for me alone. So I decided to reflect on this attempt to get onboard with a set-up that will enable me to tweet more easily about interesting things directly from my website. I'll try to do a walkthough that others can follow when I understand better the things I don't understand now.
Having got webmentions and comments working on the Mothership, I thought it high time I started giving some of the satellite sites more of an identity and more independence. First up, Eat This Podcast.
That runs on WordPress, and some time ago I moved it over to a more IndieWeb theme and implemented some of the IndieWeb principles. Notably, I POSSE longer articles using a plugin called All in One SEO.1 That actually does far more than POSSE, and one of the reasons I want to move forward is to use tools that are less of a Swiss army knife and more of a scalpel. I’m still using my @WithKnown stream, which really is part of the Mothership, to Tweet and reply to Tweets. So that seemed like a nice low-hanging fruit.
Not entirely.
This past weekend, what with it being Easter and all, I decided I would attempt to go all in on indiewebifying one of my WordPress properties. I downloaded all the plugins and all the additional plugins they told me to download and set all the settings and then retired whimpering with my tail between my legs to regroup.
Close readers of this site will have noticed a new item in the top menu: Books &c. That's where my book reviews and notes will live, and, in due time, maybe some other kinds of reviews. I promised I'd write up how I got to this point.
For a while now I've been concerned about owning my own data, in the spirit of IndieWeb. In June 2015 I started an experiment in the indieweb using a CMS called Known, and bits of that worked well enough. Trouble is, I actually have almost no control over the details of the CMS, which has meant that whenever I come across a little problem that might be within my capacity to solve, I generally can't even try. This frustration has finally reached the point where I'm prepared to do something about it, like host my own copy of Known rather than rely on Indiehosters.
listening to @phoneboyspeaks Episode 919 about Social Network News stiffened my resolve to take back control of my online presence(s). While dismissing the Ello iOS app, as everyone else has, Dameon casually mentioned Yet Another Social Platform that he signed up for "because". I too like to sign up for and play with all the shiny new things, but I also want to make life easier for myself and anyone who has the slightest interest in interacting with me.
So I've signed up for a shiny new thing.