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.

goals

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For the next few months or few years however long it takes:

  • More concrete usage of notebook / journal as corporeal thinking brain with improved legibility or at least enough to get the notes into Obsidian at a few hours' remove for digital workspace / zettelkasten purposes.

  • Press(A) 02.

  • An acceptance that the morning is when my stores of willpower are at their peak and when I'm at my most creatively fertile and that efforts to expand that throughout the day are, at best, a way to avoid other realities of life that would be best served by being present for them.

  • Further incorporate randomness-by-choice into my day.

  • Decide on how to integrate social.parentheticalrecluse.com into this space and implement it. Would love to use it as comment system. Though I have no clue how to go about doing that. Anyone want to help?

  • A full embrace that being a writer is only part of my identity not all of it and that all of those other parts fuel and infuse one another though am I always thinking and seeing like a writer.

  • This this is the only this that there is right now.

More if and when I figure it / them out.

sitenotes

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After much back and forth and many 404s, I’ve finally landed on how I’m moving forward with this space in the post-Muskville era.

First, this section, formerly blog, is now “notebook” – which makes it, to me at least, feel even more informal than it used to be. Everything will go through this page: Mastodon updates, etc, simply because I like having a central brainsilo for my day. This replaces efforts with Micro.blog, love it as I do: it was simpler to bend Squarespace to my will than attempt to retrofit this space for Micro.

More to come, but I’m quite happy with how this is working out.

shiny new self-hosted mastodon

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The waitlist email from Masto.host arrived this morning and I’m now set with my own Mastodon instance, @tww@social.parentheticalrecluse.com. Super smooth process to set up…

Now to figure out how these spaces interact. Probably same as usual, but I’m in the mood to try something new, as I have been. Anyhow, it’ll come to me – after many fits and spurts.

(that other place) notes, expanded

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Expanding, from Mastodon post:

As someone who attempted to run the day to day of a company financed by a rich asshole who thought they knew everything by virtue of being a rich asshole – though this particular rich asshole was much more hands off than Twitter's resident rich asshole (except when he had an idea that just had to happen which required me to spend most of my tenure fighting back and getting him to open the wallet to basic site functionality that needed fixing and enhancement – I mean, who would have thought that a digital archive of more than a million pages of scanned historical documents should have a robust and user-friendly search engine?) – I have nothing but sympathy for those trying to keep it afloat: You're staying with a sinking ship whose iceberg decided they should be the captain.

At this rate, I'll be stunned if Twitter's still up and running by the end of the week.

instance / workrhythm

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Successfully moved Mastodon instances from the catchall Mastodon.social to writing.exchange – I'm now at @twweaver@writing.exchange – and, in so doing, learned the value of the local timeline: what a delightful group of creative and generous people. Further, set a donation of $100/yr to the admins to keep the server lights on – which is what I probably would have paid by self-hosting my own – with the value of a new community. Worth it, I think – this co-op model is wonderful.

Accepted, somewhat, that I've slid into something of a natural workrhythm in which I work on stuff for this space / newsletter on weekends (makes me a little more elastic in terms of work/life etc etc). The two projects/day thing isn't going to work: my brain was too muddled and I spent much of the day yesterday in a jittery, button-pressing mess.

Looks like my Principles page will be going live tomorrow, maybe – eight of them in an ever-updating document.