Excursions

I have enabled the crossposting to all places again. Why? No reason. I have anyway been crossposting to Mastodon, which is the only social network I have been active on. But that need not be the case.

I am tired of overthinking stuff around my blogging. It’s okay if things aren’t perfect. I won’t worry about what reaches which audience.

I am happy as long as I write.

Wherever I get responses, I will reply. Participate in whichever stream I am in the mood to dip my toes in. Or stay away if that’s what feels right at that moment. Better to keep experimenting than to let things get stagnant.

There are two writers within me. One wants me to write as freely and as frequently as possible, blurting out everything that comes to my mind. The other wants me to weigh each word, think deeply, and post only when I have something meaningful to say. Every time they fight, which they do often, my writing stops. I am going through one such phase.

I have enjoyed writing at Scribbles recently – you can follow these posts through the RSS feed. The simplicity of the posting workflow has me hooked. The biggest draw for me is that I can easily begin a draft and expand it with more thoughts across multiple sittings. It’s a lot more frictionless than what I have found anywhere recently. The interface suits the kind of posts I am inclined to write these days - blogging regularly about life and writing.

I am sure the platform won’t work for all. There’s no support for theming. No automatic cross-posting. No markdown. Micro posts don’t sit well on the platform, either. For all that, there’s no better platform than Micro.blog. Scribbles, on the other hand, strips the blogging to the bare. To what matters: writing blog posts. And for that, the platform does enough.

So, keep an eye on Scribbles. It will launch soon to be available for sign-ups.

Exactly a month ago, I decided to stop syndicating my posts to any social networks. What have I learnt in this month?

The interactions on my posts have significantly gone down. Every post had some replies earlier. No surprise, most were on Micro.blog. A few were on Mastodon. Both have naturally gone down to zero. I have received a few emails (and fewer comments through Commento). I responded to each of them, which is something I cannot say about the earlier replies I received on the timelines. My genuine lack of interest in checking my mentions and responding to them was why I had stopped syndication.

How about traffic (yuck!)? I have no clue. Though I have analytics enabled with Tinylytics, I don’t follow the numbers. I don’t know what the numbers were earlier and how they have been impacted. There is also a possibility that most follow my blog through RSS. Whatever the case, I don’t know, and I don’t have any interest in finding out.

The most noticeable impact has been on my writing – I have stopped writing for a timeline.

Earlier, I subconsciously filtered all my posts through the lens of how they would look on a timeline. Or to the folks who tend to reply to my posts frequently. Is this too long? Too short? Does this interest all? Or some? Or anyone at all? My mind was always crowded with such unnecessary doubts. I observed this behaviour first a couple of years ago.

Writing publicly, with the voice of your readers chirping at the back of your mind, is ineffective. You write for interaction – that’s futile. Most social media posts belong to this category. You are reined back by the voice — you write for someone else. The response you expect from them, your readers, provides you the lead. You write not what you like, you write what you think your reader likes.

I even mentioned people through their social media handles in my posts. Futile, I agree. But the whole experience felt unnecessarily limiting, and I lacked the control to not let it feel.

What does all of this mean for my no-syndication experiment? As of now, nothing has changed. I like this unshackled feeling while I write. As if no one’s watching and weighing up my every word.

How about taking my writing to the readers? I am yet to find an organic way to do that. Automatic and passive syndication is not that.

I haven’t posted anything since I last wondered “why I even write anymore in public”. This question still crowds my mind. But I read what other folks write, which, in turn, makes me want to do that. So, I am not going to stop writing on my blog anytime soon.

What do I write about? Well, about nothing and everything. That has been my mantra.

I usually do not have a set template for my posts. I start writing, and the thoughts pour themselves out. The only thing I have to do is sit down at my desk and start hammering on my keyboard.

Recently, I read some excellent posts on blogging versus social media. The first is Robb Knight talking about how the web is fantastic. This feeling resonated with my current state of mind.

Blogs and RSS never died. Some of us just took a little break from it while we all shitposted on Twitter for likes, retweets, and validation. While we wrote long, unfindable threads instead of blog posts. I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

It’s been some time now since I posted to any social network. 20 days to be exact. It’s freeing to not worry about how my posts look on different timelines or how people react to them. I write on and for my blog. I have also accepted that I won’t get any reaction on even my most thoughtful posts.

I have yet to find a frictionless way to respond to a post I read. I want that.

The second post is Chris McLeod vouching for the resurgence of blogging.

[S]tumbling into such a trove of active blogs has enthused me about blogging as a medium again. It’s sparked a thought that through a combination of increased blogging activity, declining platforms, and increasing adoption of open standards to glue everything together, that maybe — just maybe — we can swing the web back towards the blog again.

I share Chris’s optimism – posting micro thoughts on social media led to the discovery of many good bloggers. I maintain my apprehensions about micro posts on the blog – I cannot write and post them. But I am okay with others doing it.

Anyway, I continue to read blogs through RSS. I continue to write on my blog. All’s well.

I wish every blog post had a footer with easy ways to respond, preferably via email. The early days of blogging were simple, with a plain comments section. All one had to do was add details about themselves and comment. Spam ruined the simplicity, and accounts were required to be created just to add a comment.

I yearn for those simpler days. I recently added a way to comment below my posts, powered by Commento. The simplicity of this system does have a price associated with it. But I want to keep that option around since I stopped syndicating posts to the social timelines.

Plus, the readers can always respond via email. I am relieved to see responses received through both of these mediums.

At the same time, it pains me when I open a blog post looking for a way to respond, and I can’t find any. Even if there is one, it is generally via some social network, which I am not keen to participate in. Please have a link to respond via email. Someday, you will receive a thoughtful response that will warm your heart.

Interactions are beautiful. Try them!

I customized the last bit of my blog theme that I hadn’t yet. RSS and JSON feeds. Could I have broken something somewhere? I am sure I could have. Do I know what that is? No clue. So I have my fingers crossed – if there’s anything that’s broken, I will find out soon or hopefully hear about it.

For the past few years, Micro.blog has hosted this blog. Every year, I revisit that decision to verify if it still is the best choice for me. I did that last year. And I did the year before. Every time, I have decided to stick to this wonderful platform. Unlike earlier, when I made such decisions by listing pros and cons, the last two times I made it based on my experience of using the other services over a year.

I have recently read a lot of people revisiting their choices of platforms and thought I should share about my experiments. I had shared my views once in 2022. This post is for the experiments since then.

Before that, here’s a quick note on how I give myself time to arrive at this decision. I have never changed my primary platform. I sign up for an annual plan with a service, set it on a custom sub-domain and use it for a full year. Sure, it’s a costly option. But as the subscription ends, I have no doubts about my decision. Neither do I have any urge to switch platforms every time I see it discussed. Anyway, onto my experiments.

In 2022, I was fascinated by what Ghost promised as a platform. It was well-reviewed, polished and highly recommended. It suited the long-form style of writing I wanted to do more of. It had a built-in newsletter. I wanted all of that. The question was, can it become my primary blogging platform. A year of continuous usage convinced me it wasn’t. Though I liked what it offered, it didn’t fit my style of writing. I am very informal in what I write. Sometimes, it is heartfelt life stories. Other times, it’s meaningless updates. More often, it’s the latter. Ghost isn’t a right fit for such posts.

For starters, it continues to need a title. And images. It wants me to play around with the metadata of the post. Before I can publish a post, all the bells and whistles distract me and I start to question if my words are worth all this polish. That’s not the feeling I want when I am about to click publish. It limits what I can do with the styling. Even the paid plan has a very limited selection of themes. Plus even with all these limitations, it is pricey. I do not earn from my blog – so $9 per month paid annually isn’t cheap.

Last year I picked up Write.as to experiment with. Unlike Ghost, its plans are simple – so I again signed up for an annual plan which unlocks all the paid features. Most importantly custom domain. I set it up as a place for my quick, unformed thoughts. It supports both short and long posts well. Plus it has got hands-down the best editor to write posts in. I could never write quick, short posts – it was that good.

But there are significant downsides that I cannot brush aside. Adding images to posts isn’t easy – need to go to a separate place to do that. The published posts look clean, but soulless. The options for styling are extremely limited. An ability to extend the capabilities is almost non-existent. The selection of good themes is negligible. The biggest problem of all is the publishing workflow, especially writing drafts, which is very frustrating. Drafts are posts published anonymously. But publishing them back to the main blog isn’t intuitive. The published dates get all messed up.

Also, I am not sure if the platform is in active development. Over the past year, I hardly saw anything change. I don’t want to spend time on a platform that’s ignored.

On both occasions, I cancelled my plan at the end of the subscription period and moved all the posts to Micro.blog. With redirects set automatically, it was as if the posts were always published here. I respect Manton for being always supportive and for actively discouraging lock-in by simplifying moving in to or out of Micro.blog.

Here’s what I had written last time while talking about why Micro.blog works for me.

[I]t suits well for both the micro and long-form posts. It has apps for all platforms that I primarily use Mac and Android. Quick notes are best made with the apps, especially so from smartphone. For posts that are long, titled, Ulysses iA Writer works perfectly well for me. No other CMS can ever work as well as a native application.

The platform is built on Hugo. And I love Hugo. (…) Building extensions in your templates is so easy, and I have gotten comfortable with it. Manton has added just enough around Hugo to make it even more useful — the APIs, the apps, the social aspects, the open plug-in and theming systems and, the most valuable, its community.

Do I use all of them [smart features]? Of course, not. But the fact that one plan provides me so much over and above the basic blogging functionality is priceless for me.

None of this has changed even now. I also haven’t observed the stability issues that I see people complain about recently. May be I have just been lucky.

No surprise then, that Micro.blog continues to be my blogging platform of choice.

I will no longer syndicate my posts to any social network timelines, that includes Micro.blog. This is the last post that gets syndicated. I will follow all my friends only via RSS and interact through emails or native comments. If you are keen to know what I am up to, you can follow the RSS feed.

For some time now, I haven’t been active on any social timelines. I simply can’t keep up. It doesn’t serve the purpose if I don’t contribute to the network and interact. At times, days go by before I respond to the mentions I receive and worse, I hardly ever reply to others’ posts. Being passively around the timeline only adds to the subconscious burden.

I also want to minimise distractions with my presence on the internet to lend myself more chances to build the right routines. Anything and everything that causes even a hint of friction has to be out. Given my general lack of patience for the hustle of social networks, they had to be out the door first.

I want to simplify everything. The tools I use. What I read. The way I write. Simple, that’s my word for the year.

After deliberating over whether to offer membership for my online creations, I decided to set up a single One a Month tier. The decision to set up a membership of any form was triggered by the recent realisation that led me to pull down Scribe- the realisation that my side projects cost me dear. Every month, the prices add up, and I eventually run out of motivation to keep going.

However, the step to keep it simple and affordable for people considering support is inspired by a recent post by Manu where he proposed changing the defaults on pricing the support.

The 1$ part means you can set it up and forget about it because it’s a low enough amount that won’t make too much of a difference for the majority of people who are considering supporting online creators.

For a period now, I have had a Buy Me a Coffee page so that others can support my hobby projects. Many have, and I could not be more grateful. I have now rolled out a simple membership to cover the projects that need hosting and, hence, carry a monthly bill. The likes of Scribe. And Micro.threads.

With one membership, there are no complicated tiers. And no special rewards, either. Frankly, I could limit the number of members to ten as that’s all I need to support my ongoing side projects. But I am keeping things simple for now.

However, in today’s tumultuous world, one full of uncertainty, to expect anything in return for my hobby projects would be unfair on my part. No obligation, hence, on anyone whatsoever.