trying something new, part two

in

Over the last several months, I've been trying to figure out what form, exactly, best represents the me of now in the digital space (medium being the message, perhaps). Back and forth between this blog being my primary representation and a more informal (heh) and far-less-onerous-than-Squarespace approach via my self-hosted Mastodon instance. Like the proverbial Goldilocks, none of them fit and, though I've yet to be eaten, I knew I needed a new approach.

Thanks to Claude AI, two RSS feeds, and many iterations of back and forth coding, I've got both; enter: Scraps, the best of both worlds, that works for the me of now: when I want to write something longer or post the daily Informality, it goes through the blog. When I want to dash off something of a more ephemeral, fleeting nature, Mastodon. Both, then, are combined in the widget that takes up this Scraps page; the widget is designed to only share posts from the blog that have titles – this post is, itself, a test post to see how full-text posting looks in the widget. If someone wants to only follow longer-form piecs, the blog rss still works great; if you want to go through Mastodon, follow me there or via that page's RSS feed.

Still ironing out the kinks, but I'm rather pleased with this.

shake shake shake

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A desire to shake things up here though I don't know which things will be shaken. Considered multiple avenues, including simply a homepage featuring a single Attendance Card and occasional edits to the Currently page – though suppose I always could go with the Currently page as the homepage, since it would combine both...

Unsure if this desire is indicative of a switch to more inner processing or a genuine boredom with being online (as I've become generally bored with the internet which is both a reflection of me and of the internet's current state) or something else; I have, I suppose, been doing this blogging thing for a minute or two – but it is, nonethless, a form I've loved and continue to love: along with email newsletters, it's the warhorse of the internet age.

Note: most likely change / shake shake will be no shake / change at all – but I can’t deny that the desire is there.

“something more ‘inward’…”

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Pleasant Monday surprise: something I wrote appearing elsewhere (that elsewhere being Kevin Hodgson’s always-excellent Kevin's Meandering Mind blog) along with a super-cool graphic version of same and generous linkage to the newsletter! Super-cool graphic version:

And I loved Kevin’s rumination on it (a sentiment I wholeheartedly echo) about blogs now being an inward space:

Tyler’s piece had me thinking (yet again) of this blogging space, and how my view of it has changed over time. It used to be more of a space that I imagined as “outward” facing — sharing with other bloggers, and being connected into larger blogging networks — but now I see it more as a reflective space, something more “inward” where I am curating my writing and thinking. My audience may be smaller (I may be my only audience) but I still keep the door open for others (you, perhaps?) to peek in and see what I’m up to.

Also happy to find myself sharing space with James Shelley's excellent piece, What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore? Many thanks, my friend.

blog is

in

While I'm reticent to commit upon this space the cardinal sin of blogging – that sin being to blog about blogging (or, perhaps, it's to call writing about blogging the cardinal sin of blogging IDK) – I've become concerned (fairly or un-) over the last several weeks that in the whatever-it-becomes internet era we're entering that there will be – as with all of the internet eras prior – an urge to standardize and impose rules upon the blog or, rather, the blog form: to be considered a blog an internet presence must have x, y; it must have a title; it must contain this / that, yadda yadda yadda – and I thought it might be useful, if only for myself (the only person for whom this space is generally useful in the first place), to commit to the digital ether what I consider the blog form to be at this very moment, weds/20230322 between 1000 and 1036.

A blog is whatever the fuck the person creating it wants it to be, an ever-unfurling, living, breathing snapshot of its creator in the moment of publication: it is defined not in what you post but rather in that you post (it can also be defined by your periods of silence – these, too, are a snapshot of you), a whole, a totality revealed only in frequency and existence and even then a form remaining at its purest and most unfiltered open to endless permutation and variation, an amorphous nebula that thrives on iteration and change: a captionless picture IS a blog post; a link devoid of commentary IS a blog post; a rambling 3000-word diatribe IS a blog post; a thoroughly-composed 60,000 word novella about your cat's telepathic powers IS a blog post; a sentence to follow up on a 3000 word diatribe IS a blog post; a single word IS a blog post: it is the synthesis and collision of these dashed-off or deeply thought proofs of existence that constitute the single greatest vehicle of internet-connected individual expression available to us: it can be as human as we are – but only if we let it.