Tending my little plot of the Internet

As many parts of the Internet continue to get worse, I figured it was time to improve my own little plot.

I mean, I’m always tinkering, making small tweaks regularly. Did you know I keep /now up-to-date? But anyways, a couple changes here felt big enough to write about.

My microblog is mine

I’ve been outputting random microposts since… checks archive 2009, apparently. They were “status updates” back then. With Twitter dying, I started doing that sort of thing on Mastodon, and then on BlueSky. Wherever the people want to be, I suppose.

At first they were just silly jokes. But eventually, besides announcements, they became ways to express raw (bad) ideas and get feedback. But something about that always bugged me: they were on someone else’s property, and linking to them (let alone finding them again) felt bad.

So, I own my microblog now. They have their own place on this domain. They get a dedicated RSS feed. And they are included in the main feed (currently prefixed as “Micro” so you know). They get syndicated to those other networks automatically as threads.

What makes them micro? I don’t constrain myself to just 250 characters or anything. They’re so far about 3 paragraphs. That’s about the size, I aim for, I guess. It let’s me publish thoughts without blocker energy telling me I need to polish it into an essay. It also allows me to output 1 or 2 a week. Or none.

And I can link to them and build on them. Mine!

Subscribe via email

I have improved the subscribe via email option of this site.

For a long time, “subscribe via email” was easy and nice, provided by Feedburner. When that service was shutdown, I looked for an alternative. Something that was both free and automatically just worked from an RSS feed.

I’m sorry about that. I picked something horrible, a service I don’t want to provide any further attention. They inject gross click-baity ads inside the emails. I subscribe to myself, and after being repulsed at the last email, I had to fix it.

I couldn’t find any other service that automatically works from RSS for free. I could pay for a service, but I don’t need to send that much email. And I’m doing this as a convenience, to let users read how they want, not as a business. It’s not a newsletter.¹

So I imported that list to Buttondown. I can copy-paste the markdown of blog posts manually. That’s fine, I don’t write so often to need it to be automated.

But since it is manual, I can do more. I can also include a list of “recent microblog posts”, now that I own them.

Anyways, back to continual tinkerage.²