I’ve always wanted to find a way to easily include small bits of text or images here on Newley.com that I would otherwise post only on silos owned Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
I’m talking about links, observations, snapshots — not full blog posts, which I’ll continue to write, but rather fun little snippets that I’d nevertheless like to have a record of here.
After all, this site has been my own, tiny little part of the web since 2002, before those platforms ever emerged. Who knows what they’ll look like in the decades ahead.
I want to have all my personal content hosted here, under my control, but I still want to take advantage of these social platforms’ reach.
So I was really excited to read recently about Manton Reece‘s new Micro.Blog effort, part of a successful Kickstarter campaign called Indie Microblogging.
I’ve signed up for the service — I’m @Newley) — though visiting that link won’t tell you much about how it all works. It essentially provides a platform that pulls together micro-posts from individuals’ blogs.
The setup allows me to post here first, and then those items are pulled in via RSS to Micro.Blog, a central repository for such posts, and then they’re distributed elsewhere.
It’s all based on the “POSSE” concept: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
The end result doesn’t change much for folks reading this blog — though you’ll likely see a higher volume of much shorter items — but it’s fun to think about my site truly becoming the default repository for my ramblings writings and photos, just like it was before the rise of social media.
Anyway, you may have seen some of these microblog posts here and in the main Newley.com RSS feed of late.
(In WordPress, I use the Aside post type, which renders a bit differently than normal posts, with no title and a blue background. I also created a new Snippets category, with its own RSS feed that’s pulled into Micro.Blog.)
If you’d like to get my microblog snippets separately, that RSS feed is:
https://newley.com/category/snippets/feed/
Stay tuned for more. I’d also like to figure out a way to remove the microblog posts from my main feed, in case folks would only like to see my longer dispatches.
