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In RSS is Really Simple I conjectured that the state of the internet would be very different and to be honest better, had we elided these closed platform in favour of something open like simple RSS.
I’m enjoying the longer form concept of the blog. It’s making me realise how since school and university how little time I actually spend putting pen to paper and thinking and writing about something for more than five seconds. I’m also finding myself more inclined to spend commuting time a little bit more mindfully and pick up notes and jot something down rather than, say, desperately scroll on patchy phone signal.
All this said though there is some role still for shorter form micro blogging. The halcyon days of the golden era of Irish Twitter, of bread flying off the shelves during a storm, yer man doing ketamaine while serving drinks to the president, the Luas is free…
Twitter’s fate is sealed of course, and I have no interest in throwing my wailings about what’s going on with it, and what that represents into the chasm of gloom. All I know is I want out, so I’ve archived and deleted my account. Freedom.
That brings us to what I’m doing in its place. Bluesky is cool but it’s still another enclosed platform. I’m sure ActivityPub or the AT protocol or whatever it uses is cool and all but I’m not interested really. What I am interested in is how I can generate more pages for my website.
Enter the Web Posts. Another fine invention of
andrewshaw.nl.
I have taken the liberty to reinvent and reimplement the format. Within my site’s codebase I have a bag of markdown files which all get hoovered up at page generation time. The creation time of the file is taken to be the post date, and they all get stuffed into /posts.html.
Now I don’t carry my laptop everywhere, and I can't regenerate the site on the go, and I don’t want to turn up a whole backend to accept posts (the site is still static HTML), so instead I have a neat little workflow using iCloud and shortcuts:
This gets saved into a markdown file in my iCloud Drive, and then at generation time, these are all copied over with the rest of the posts.
Now, there is one glaring flaw here which is that the posts don’t have any social function. Not much of a social media replacement, is it? I’m working on a feature to allow folks to email me to reply to a post which I'll play around with. Who knows, maybe I'll get some replies.
For the moment I think it’s very neat. Since it’s markdown, of course I can do whatever I like and use mad formatting, gifs, iframes, whatever.
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