Micro.Camp 2023 is over. I had fun, enjoyed listening and participating, and got exciting new ideas to explore. For me, these include mainly three categories. books, photos, and movies.

Books

Micro.blog (MB) has an excellent book integration built into the left sidebar. You can find a book there and import it directly into a post. My problem with books is that I can’t get myself through reading one. I turned to the book lovers of MB for advice and got several good tips. Here they are in no particular order:

  1. Audiobooks: Listening to a good narrator reading a book can help and improve the experience
  2. Don’t be afraid to jump somewhere in the middle of a book and start reading to spice things up a bit. Books are slow; most chances are you won’t spoil everything if you read a page or two.
  3. Push yourself to read at least 10% of a book before putting giving up. Many books take their time to get interesting. On the other side of this coin (I’m adding this as a personal note), if a book still sucks after that 10%, don’t force yourself to keep reading it. There are plenty of other books to read.
  4. If you read a book and find yourself glazing over pages or reading the same line over and over, put it down and read something else. Reading a book is a skill. Develop it on something lighter for a bit (like magazines or blog posts) before trying for a whole novel.

Photos

The MB community is very active around photos. There’s a dedicated photo page by default in most themes and an option to upload photos to short and long posts, which can also be re-posted to other services automatically, like Flickr.

Lurking in the chatroom, I learned that Glass is now available on the web and on Android. I registered and quickly realized why it’s a photographer’s favorite. The interface is beautifully minimal and shows you nothing but photos. Unlike Instagram, you won’t find folks using posting pictures of text. Zero ads. You have to pay to use Glass, but I feel it’s worth it.

While Glass comes with an RSS feed that can be used with MB (go to your Glass profile URL and add /rss at the end), it doesn’t allow much customization. The MB team is looking into ways to improve Glass' integration, but for now, it seems there’s not much to work with from Glass’s side.

Still, the resourceful MB community came up with a couple of plugins and themes that work better with photos (I’m experimenting with one of them right now, under the photos page.) This is a good place to mention Jean’s post about Discovery, prompting people to make sure their photos include a description (via the “alt” HTML tag).

Movies

Weird/indie/rare films are something I tried to get into in the past and failed. I knew there were movie lovers on MB, and I feel lucky I stumbled upon Chris Campbell’s presentation. Chris uses letterboxd is a movie professional, and listening to him about the benefits of letterboxd sold me within a minute. I had a profile on letterboxd I haven’t really used, but I intend to fix this now.

Letterboxd calls itself “a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery.” It’s a free service that offers a clean browsing experience (almost no ads) and a lot of information. And yes, it also comes with an RSS feed.

It seems like I have a couple of movies to catch up on…!

When I joined MB, I was looking for a place to save me time messing around with Hugo. But MB proved to be more than a blogging solution. It’s a community of passionate individuals with similar interests to mine. The true value of this place is the interaction with the community, something I learn to appreciate a bit more every day.