In the past, I created a couple of weekly video updates (you can find a couple of those on Diode Zone, a PeerTube instance), but it seems written updates are gathering momentum, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Locations chek-ins on the blog

I started looking into location check-ins in Micro.blog two weeks ago. The idea came to me one early morning and woke me up, as these ideas do often enough. Since I use the blog to keep track of my photos, my reading list, my books, and my movies, why not use it to keep track of my visits to certain locations? For that, I started using OwnYourSwarm. Unfortunately, OwnYourSwarm postings are pretty fragile. It took a long time to get it to work the way I wanted, and now it’s broken yet again, and I’m tired of figuring out why.

I’m considering doing this process half-manually. My latest post from Central Park is an example of that: it includes a picture of the place, a “soundtrack” I recorded while I was there, and a map which I grabbed directly from my Check-in in Swarm through Foursquare. I like how it came out.

RSS organization & Bookmarks in Micro.blog

I wanted to consolidate my RSS feeds since I have two three RSS stashes: one on my Android device, which I use for reading (it’s also my dedicated ebook reading device), Emacs on the Mac, and a small list of news outlets on my iPhone.

The best place for feeds For me is Emacs with Elfeed, as I use it to write my posts as well. Emacs also opens links in EWW, the script-free Emacs built-in browser, which makes reading easier without annoying ads and links.

I’m mostly done at this point, with a couple of places I visit in a browser: Micro.blog’s Timeline and Discover is one, and my interest-specific lists on Mastodon are the nother. I can check these sources once or twice a day and look for interesting articles to bookmark on Micro.Blog.

Speaking of which, I rediscovered Micro.blog’s bookmarking feature. It’s excellent. It reminds me a lot of Pocket, but it goes further by storing the articles I grabbed in an Amazon bucket, stripped of any ads and annoyances. This means I can go back and look at something I read five years from now without worrying about the original content being down. The premium plan I’m on allows me to tag these bookmarks, and I’ve decided on three tags so far: read, reply, and post. I tag the bookmarks after I skimmed the article so that I know if it contains good nuggets I want to learn or implement in my own workflows (read), if it’s just a good post from someone and I want to write back to (reply), or if I want to use the highlight feature (another perk of Micro.blog’s bookmarks) to create quotes and write (post) about it.

Cross-posting to Mastodon

The issue I previously had with cross-posting to my existing Mastodon account from Micro.blog was the replies. I wanted folks from Mastodon to reply to my blog so that the discussion would show there. But Manton’s book made me change my mind (see Cross-posting and Silos.) I realized that I’m missing out on good discussions I’ve had for two years on Mastodon because I want readers to read my content the way I tell them to. And that’s dumb.

While Micro.blog does come with a basic “built-in” Mastodon account, it’s not optimized for Mastodon as well as my full-time Mastodon account on Fosstodon. Thankfully, Mastodon allows me to edit posts now, so I can go back to any post automatically created by Micro.blog to add hashtags and edit the content in a way that makes it easier and more welcoming to folks there. This worked better than I thought, as folks boosted and started discussions with me on Mastodon I would otherwise missed - sometimes from folks on Micro.blog itself even.

I’m considering copying over some of my stuff to Instagram as well since this is where I have more friends and family, and they can’t be bothered with RSS feeds and websites.

The Wiki

I haven’t added something substantial to the wiki this week, but I should mention I’ve added personal notes about meditation and mental health in the last month or so. This week, I added a note about following Mastodon users with RSS feeds, Improved instructions about accent above letters (and other symbols) in Emacs, and updated the About section in the wiki.