Blogging as a public PKM

Yeah, but it doesn’t seem suitable. I do a lot of link blogging. Maybe Revue will become something.

Is it appearance you struggle with? I also host my blog on Wordpress and actually finding it quite good.

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Partly appearance, partly the requirement for titles.

Hugo is an easy way to blog. Static site generator - just store your markdown files in a Git repo and auto deploy on a service like Netlify-for FREE! They take care of ssl, etc. No security worries, no servers to patch, etc.

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Seconding this method, but I personally use Jekyll over Hugo mainly due to the fact that it has a lot more plugin and theme options available since it’s so widely used.

But other than that, I do the same exact thing; write in markdown in the local folder for my site, push to Github, and Netlify automatically serves it in what feels like seconds. I couldn’t be happier with this workflow.

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For simplicity, I like Blot, but…

…if you’re picky enough to want the look of your blog “just right” it may not be for you.

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Not to mention the ability to easily (hugo server) serve the content locally for preview and edits - THEN publish it!

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Mine (https://fulcra.design and https://axle.design) are on Blot.im as well.

Pro tip: Blot recently added support for [[wikilinks]] and the developer is working on enabling fenced YAML. This’ll make it fully compatible with Obsidian.

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blot.i’m is very interesting to me. I struggle with appearance though and I do not have the know how to get it just right. I am one of those that know something isn’t to my liking but necessarily able to code to my liking…

What theme are you using?

I think your previous stop—microblog— is the most compliant to do one of the things you try to achieve. Microblog supports webmention out of the box. It means, you can syndicate your content anywhere on internet, but keeps the original copy in microblog. It’s just like wordpress’ pingback

Also, with Brid.gy, you can reshare your post content to Facebook (also twitter, IG), and let brid.gy resend the reactions (like, comments) from your friends in FB and display them as reaction to your original content. example in my non-english blogpost, with reaction from my social media friends at the bottom. My blog is not hosted in micro.blog per se, it uses hugo and the stack mentioned by @dsh1705 earlier. Actually micro.blog also uses hugo as the generator. micro.blog makes it ieasy to have ‘indie.web’ compliant website.

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I have tried to simplify and moved to just using Notion for my digital gardening/evergreen writing (not chronological).

I was procrastinating something extensively anxiety-provoking and spent a great many hours tuning the Magazine template.

You can still see the resemblance but I’d like to think mine look kinda unique now.

But yea, this is the biggest downfall with having too much customization. There’s always something else to tweak…

without a doubt. It looks great. I prefer a minimal site and after lots of searching, I landed on a theme that works well for me. It may not be unique because its an open source theme but I gather, with my logo (self made on canva) and color accent, its pretty different. I am happy with it.

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You’d be surprised how many times I Google something about an old Mac to find something I wrote like 8 years ago on the topic.

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… anywhere on the internet but Facebook, where most of my friends are.

And for Twitter if my Microblog post goes over 180 characters, it links back to the microblog post, rather than doing a proper Twitter thread

Since I wrote the OP, I realized that one part of my problem is that many of my blog posts are kitschy found media on the web — old ads, photos, etc.

I realized that stuff has no place on my proper blog.

So I decided to move it to Tumblr as a web home, and keep the links, plain text, and original photos on mitchwagner.blog.

I mix both streams — the kitschy found internet media and original content — on Twitter and Facebook.

The problem here is that the social media platforms are siloed. Most of my friends are on Facebook. I hate Facebook as software, even apart form the company’s shady business practices. Yet I’m stuck on Facebook if I want to get in conversations with most of my friends who are online.

A few people are on twitter — enough to keep me posting there as well. I hate Twitter’s 280-character limit, which makes me hate Twitter as software too.

The Twitter people hate Facebook and the Facebook people hate Twitter, so I can’t pick one.

I like the public web, which is why I keep a blog. But hardly anybody reads the blog.

I share the blog posts as a newsletter, using MailChimp’s free tier and its RSS automation. Some people like the newsletter.

IndyWeb has the right idea … I guess … but it’s confusing as heck and every time I look into it I think I do not have time for this. POSSE? Bridgy? Webmentions? Huh? If I want to speak a foreign language, I’ll learn Cantonese. Normal people are never going to think about that kind of thing.

For the past few years, I do a lot of cut-and-pasting. The pasteboard on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad gets a good workout.

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Your blog looks interesting. I see you do something I want to do, which is link from the title/subject line. That’s something I would like to do, and which Wordpress really, really does not want me to do.

Microblog does support that — prominently — but one of my problems with Microblog is that it seems to be a passion project by one guy. Will it be around in five years?

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Having just slagged the IndyWeb movement for the sixth hundredth time, I took another look at Bridgy and said to myself hmmmmm that looks interesting. If it actually posts to Facebook, as opposed to just posting a link, that would be very interesting indeed.

I hear you. The walled gardens have had a frustrating effect on public discourse.

For a while I tried to use Zapier/IFTTT to make every new blog post a post on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, but the results just looked tacky. It was pretty clear that I was trying to be lazy with my engagement in the different platforms. As a consequence, no one engaged with my contributions. (And then there’s the issue of context collapse.)

Maybe those automation options have advanced, though. If it was easy to generate well-fitting content for the different platforms, it would be a great solution to this problem.

I have put in some of the effort to make these tools work, and it still makes no sense to me. I respect the folks who are putting together the infrastructure, though, and I really hope it leads to a new golden age for the Internet… somehow.

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