Since early 2019(!), I’ve been slowly but surely orienting my online presence around my Hugo blog. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on social media platforms, but that those are merely appendages to a website that I have more control over. In fact, I’m really pleased with the POSSE—Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—setup that I’ve developed over the past couple of years. It currently works like this: All of my posts start on this website, and then I use the EchoFeed service to send posts to my Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account (Micro.blog also imports my posts via RSS).

I keep saying that I blog for myself before any other audience, but there’s a lot I haven’t been posting because I knew my POSSE setup was borked these past couple of weeks. I think it’s fixed now, so time to get those posts finished and published.

I started using the static site-friendly, largely non-creepy Tinylytics service in 2023, and a few weeks ago, I finally forked over the money for the paid version of the service. [EDIT: I’ve since cancelled my subscription to the service because I’m no longer sure it aligns with my values.] This year, I’ve become skeptical enough of quantification as a concept that I feel vaguely guilty about tracking which of my posts get how many views, but I’m also a researcher who understands the value of quantification, and it’s also, well, validating to see which of my posts get traction. That said, I still know not to put too much faith in these numbers—for example, I got a very abnormal 537 hits to my website from Finland on October 24th that I just can’t figure out.

Yes, yes, and yes. I don’t know what the future of the social web will look like, but blogs are what it should look like.

Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

I have done more blogging this summer than in the two preceding years, and I love it. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up this rate once the school year starts, but I want to keep up consistency.

As I’ve been working on updating this website and revamping my web presence over the course of the summer, one of the items on my to-do list has been to add a commenting feature to the website. I love Hugo, but the absence of any in-built commenting feature is definitely a downside. I’ve looked over various Hugo-compatible commenting systems, but I honestly don’t know how much commenting activity I’ll see, and I’ve been hesitant to pay a third-party platform to do all of this for me.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks how to best add commenting to my Hugo static site, and it just hit me that I could embed Hypothesis and use that as a social layer. Very excited about this idea.

What a mess. Glad to be pivoting toward my blog and Mastodon.

I am up late on the busy week before the semester starts trying to write an Alfred workflow for generating Hugo blog posts and a Siri Shortcut to support a new approach to linkblogging, so…

This post is a test of Twitter integration with my new Hugo blog (via Siri Shortcuts).

Hello World! This is a test of a Siri Shortcut for posting to my new Hugo blog from iOS.