A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
Micro Stream
Some other stuff ...
On This Day
Webring
What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated
A little while ago I decided that paying micro.blog to host my, er, micro blog was probably a better bet for my mental health than continuing to plug away at my self-hosted idno (aka WithKnown). It was not an easy decision, which probably owes more to the sunk-cost fallacy than actual loyalty or anything, and it is by no means over, but so far I do prefer the experience.
The biggest single difficulty has been posts that contain photographs. At first, they looked fine, but that turned out to be because they were getting the image from WithKnown even though the import had successfully sucked up all the image files. I fixed a couple by shuffling between different bits of MB and Withknown before I persuaded myself that there had to be a better way. Bulk editing of the files is not available, but the thought did remind me of Mars Edit. Nothing but good memories of that for managing websites, so I was happy to upgrade and impressed that a purchase from 2019 still qualified for a discount.
With Mars Edit and a copy of the original file that MB imported I have been able to go through posts with a photo, find the upload on MB, copy the HTML for the photo, paste it into Mars Edit and upload the edited post. Everything still has to be done by hand, but it is a lot easier and I get to make minor adjustments if needed. To begin with I was doing every single post with a photo, but with more than 850 of them, that began to get stale quickly, so I am now being more selective.
No idea when I will be finished, and I am probably being far too completist about the whole thing, but until it is done I need to keep the idno site live as without it I cannot tell which photo belongs to the enigmatically titled Unknown-23. I suspect I’ll become less discerning as time goes by, and when it is done I will nuke the idno site and transfer the domain to MB.
Along the way, for a change of pace, I’ve started to replace the idno domain in various tools I use. The big one will be Aperture, the basis of my feed reading, where I cannot simply upload an OPML file and have to add the feeds individually (though not, I hope, by hand). That might be a task for next week.
The key lesson for all this is that one promise of the IndieWeb can be fulfilled. My data is mine, and as long as I can export it and reimport it, it can live wherever I choose. But nobody ever said it would be easy.
I’m grateful to @help for helping sort out a few newbie misunderstandings, and I still don’t fully understand the whole business of building special pages and using categories effectively. Then again, I’m not sure I need to. I didn’t have those things on WithKnown and I’m not going to go all in on using micro.blog as a replacement for this site.
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
Comments
I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).