It would seem that the various social media platforms are all over the place as of late in terms of features, content, value, etc... I've tried to keep my options open by maintaining an account on several of the latest contenders such as Threads, Bluesky, X and others.
I spent the last week or revisting each one and reviewing a bunch of their pros and cons. And the results? I've decided that (at least for the near term) all of my accounts will go dormant, except for my Mastodon account.
My thinking is that if I just focus on one, I could build it up to become as useful and entertaining as the old Twitter days. And just like those old days, it will take time and effort to grow and curate the feed to my tastes.
There's a whole slew of great content out there (and did I mention that Mastodon has actual, working hashtags?) and some not so great stuff as well. In addition to being able to follow the aforementioned hashtags along with the ability to create filters to block out that which I'm not interested in, I would like to think that it could be reasonable informative.
Other platforms still excel in areas of hyper-local news like weather reports, mostly because that's where the general population has been for the last decade or more.
The downside of putting some energy into curating that particular feed is that it takes away from other activities such as this blog. Perhaps rationing social media screen time will still allow me to post more frequently here.
On a more somber note: Ozzy Osbourne 12/03/1948 - 07/22/2025
In the meantime here are a few links that stood out to me this past week that you may find entertaining and/or educational. Enjoy!
Notable Links
- I'm Done With Social Media, or why I have a blog now by Caroline Crampton
- Privacy and Security on Mastodon at PrivacyGuides.org
- Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy a new novelette in the MurderBot universe by Martha Wells
Baby steps... writing this entry on my local machine and transferring it to the blog, rather than editing it in the web interface. It will take a few iterations until I get this where I want it to be.
In other news, the Missouri River 340 race is currently under way! Noted as the "World's longest non-stop river race" I think we're going to find a place along the river where we can watch some of the paddlers and cheer them on this year. Maybe a pipe-dream, but I think this would be a great way to spend a few days on the river!
It's been a bit since I've taken the time to do a bit of hand-coding of html/php/css and I think I missed it actually. The blog (and the overall site) is still a bit disjointed, and I'm continually tweaking the CSS, but so far, it's been rather fun.
Still lots to do. At some point I may bring over all the old posts from across the years... but then again, maybe a fresh clean start is in order.
Testing a different format along with an attachment. This seems to work using a subfolder for the attachment.
The next question is do I write each entry in HTML with the appropriate tags, or figure out a way to use Markdown and some javascript converter?
I'll be doing things manually for the time being and slowly automating and updating as I go those things that get in the way or that do not provide a good experience for blogging here
Todo:- Add timestamps for those days that have multiple updates (the one above was manually added)
- At one point, I had a comments function. I might rebuild that at some time in the future
- Back-end automation. I don't want to be hindered with logging into a web-interface every time I want to create a post. SFTP/SSH/Git or some such would be way better
A second entry. Brand new. Still doing it by hand. Contemplating the better ways of managing the entries.. as single files/db entries... much work still to be done.
A snippet from my first ever blog post: (links courtesy of the Wayback Machine):
Hmmm.... well what do we have here? another journal? Oh boy. Well, after following the adventures of some friends of mine, I thought I might as well give this a try and see just what I would have to say on a day to day basis.
Ah yes, before I forget: