tl:dr
I have been filling in my personal gratitude dairy for a while since the Thinking Digital workshop the gratitude habit by the wonderful Sarah Raad. Its been really good and useful. However I have found it tricky posting it somewhere consistently. So in short I finally moved it to a new blog and will be aggregating it my gratitude page.
Long
Some of you may wonder why on earth I post them publicly anyway? But I found its been a genuinely nice & humbling thing for others to read too (aka it helps others to stop and think about their own life too).
I first started posting in my note application Standard Notes which has a feature to post to listed under my own connected domain. It was great but then I switched from Standard Notes to Joplin. I could have made some neat system to take a Joplin note and covert it to a web page using XSLT but as the notes are encrypted it made things difficult. I thought I’d give a static website builder a try and settled on Nikola.
Once again it was good but there was a problem I hit. When posting I was syncing directly to my own server using a vpn, writing the files meant creating a new file then triggering nikola to do the job. This is fine for my ubuntu laptop, tricky for my chromebook and a real pain when I only had my phone late at night. I spend half the time setting up the connection switching to a terminal logging in then writing the actual gratitude. This hasn’t been so bad during the covid19 lockdown but after a long while I decided to switch again.
This time I thought I have the WordPress app on all my devices or I have a browser. If I could post gratitude to my personal blog but with a different feel, that could work well. This is where I looked into the Indieweb Kinds and WordPress Formats. I made all my gratitude’s a status (wordpress format) and note (indieweb kinds). It was ok but I had to turn off all comments and social sharing each time. It was fine but a bit of a pain till I installed the duplicate post plugin, which I configured to duplicate into a draft which I could edit then post with the new gratitude and new date.
Great all is well except one thing…
It was posting my gratitude’s to twitter/mastodon and linkedin even when I turned off the jet pack option. I didn’t mind the twitter/mastodon one so much but they lack much content and just didn’t fit. Talking about not fitting, on linkedin they certainly didn’t fit and seemed massively out of place. I was looking for a way to post to my blog but bypassing the aggregator feed which sends posts elsewhere. This is where I considered a another sub-blog.
I finally decided to start another wordpress blog so I can post from any device or anywhere easily enough. But also aggregate it into my blog if needed but bypass the aggregator. Its not perfect but at least its more controlled.
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