- Setting up my own blog locally on a Raspberry Pi was a proper treat. Moving that to the web was a bloody nightmare.
- Hello, World: Twenty years late to the blogging party
Setting up my own blog locally on a Raspberry Pi was a proper treat. I was a genius, seeing all the moving parts coming together. The server, the WordPress installation, twiddling file permissions, setting all the passwords… The satisfaction I feel when everything comes together is me in my element.
Adapting that blog and hosting it on the web, on the other hand, was a bloody nightmare. I thought it’d be just as easy as reading up on a few guides, and to some, it probably is. My experience was like trying to build a single IKEA unit using numerous other instruction manuals: Wires get crossed, mismeasurements are made, YouTube is consulted, the cat runs off with your nuts; forget this, I’m going for a Twix.
The pain of being dyspraxic is that you can have all the steps laid out in front of you, and you can rehearse them in your head all you want, but when it comes to Doing The Thing™, you can still shit the bed, glance aside morosely, and exit stage left. Yes, not my left, your left. I’ve no idea what I got wrong, but the website was having none of it. I did what I could, and the end result is one redundant Pi puttering about like a spare prick, and one wallet being relieved of a not-insubstantial amount of money.
I’m not incurious so much as I have too much curiosity, and struggle to accept the impossibility of knowing everything you could ever want to know about IT. That curiosity is why I started a blog, even if I might’ve missed the starting gun by twenty-odd years. No-one who runs a blog has to wear a big button reading, “Ask Me, I’m An Expert.”
https://semaphoreandcairn.com/2018/02/16/blogging-in-an-expert-society/
Reading other people’s blogs in the last year or so made me realise how cool it is to just have your own site, where you post your own things, and link to wherever, whoever, whenever. You lose a bit of that magic with social media – you’re hemmed into walled gardens that, theoretically, you can check out of anytime you like, but your accounts, your posts, your connections can never leave. The IndieWeb project prefers to use the term silos, to reflect the nature of the reality behind the facade of ‘discover and be discovered:’
If you’re interested in a lot of things like me, and you want to find and let other people know, the seemingly natural course of action is to open an account on a social media platform of your choice and get talking. Social media companies know this as well as Alexander Graham Bell knew how impactful the telephone would become. Both technologies are subject to network effects: their value as a social tool increases proportionate to the number of people who use it. If you joined Twitter, it’s a safe bet that you did so because your friends are on Twitter, and vice versa.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
The thing is, a post on social media may be penned by you, but you don’t own the site, and so you don’t fully own your posts. Although a benign stream-of-consciousness tweet may not seem like anything that could be called ‘work,’ you’ve technically put in work that benefits Twitter more than it benefits you. As a private company, the platform reserves the right to delete your posts, revoke your posting abilities, and reduce your reach. You’re also not entitled to a reason why. This is most prominent on sites like YouTube, where video makers scrupulously self-censor their language and video elements to both beat around and prod the black box that is its recommendation algorithm. This phenomenon has been called by some as ‘algospeak.’ If your video gets taken down or demonetised, you often have to don your Journalist hat to figure out why.
If I post on my own site, the site which I own1, who’s stopping me from syndicating those posts elsewhere? Folks on other platforms who stick around get to read the blog as they like it, and it’s a win-win. I plan to start syndicating to Mastodon, Twitter, figure out how RSS works and maybe get a newsletter going at some point. I’m still reading up on how to POSSE on the IndieWeb wiki (Post Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and as ever, the idea is simple, but implementing it is a bit more complicated.
I know I’ve dedicated half of this post to reading blogs, but honestly, my main motivation was needing a public space to write about all the interesting things I encounter. It’s easier for me to express in words what I’m interested in rather than talking about it. Who makes the web interesting, if not all the people who, having read and studied some interesting things themselves, put stuff out there?
- Weeeeeeeeell, I’m technically renting, but the landlord seldom comes knocking… ↩︎
“Prologue” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.