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.
Obviously in the middle of a pandemic, it would be a awful idea to bring together a bunch of people from different households to spend 2 days and a night together. Lucky as we all are, we have the internet.
The bright sparks running BarCampManchester decided it could work online and they made it happen with some custom coding for the session wall and a clever setup of Discord.
I haven’t been a fan of discord but was surprised once I downloaded the Flatpak version for Linux, how effective it was. Before long I was barcamp as usual. Except I had some things I needed to do in the morning. I left a note saying save me a spot on the session wall, knowing how they fill up in the afternoon. Chris pointed out, its all virtual, it would be trivial to create another space/room. Of course I mistakenly was thinking with my physical brain, welcome to the virtual. It was like Eames in inception to Arthur
You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.
Once back I threw myself in with a number of other people not just from Manchester but around the UK. Why limit yourself to just Manchester right? Old friends showed up and we had a good old natter. The sessions were good and even ran a couple myself (one about adaptive podcasting and the other about my gratitude habit).
Of course at the end after the end talk, some diabolo time, some food and a catch up with my family. There was still enough people to play werewolf on werewolv.es with discord.
I got to say it was all good, ok its not going to beat a physical in person barcamp but once I got use to discord it worked quite well. I enjoyed it and as potentially we are looking at another 12-18 months of this pandemic, this could potentially be a good community way to run barcamp.
There was talk about a BarCampManchester11 during winter and if there was, I certainly would get a ticket and make sure theres nothing clashing. Its tricky for sponsorship but I was thinking maybe if people paid between £2-10 maybe that could really help if you were able to get upwards of 50-100 people? This could be done with Eventbrite too, making things less friction.
Could you run a conference this way? Potentially but it would depend on what kind of conference. Good luck getting the public to install discord I would think.