Monthly Archives: July 2014

Merged another blog into this one

Rants, To Export, , ,

I realize that maintaining a separate personal blog apart from BigMinds Media would be a bit redundant. Granted, I know that importing a personal blog into this one will result in a greater variety of topics to cover, and that it may be distracting to readers, but I think I’m OK with that.

BigMinds will become a personal blog + portfolio, more frequently updated with the widest-possible variety of topics imaginable: Secularity, tech, LGBT, politics, feminism, science, films and books, family, health, events, and so on.

Pretty much, this will become an experiment in maintaining an online presence outside of (not separate from) Facebook, Twitter and G+. A space that I can call my own and can import to my own site in the future.

I use to blog at LiveJournal in the 2000s, and that blog documents a lot of my life during that time, even though I’m reluctant to import those posts to this blog due to some of the embarrassing stuff I posted at that time. Maybe a few will be imported in the future, but not at the moment.

But for now, BigMinds will serve a greater duty for me and for my portfolio as well.

On the #IndieWeb

To Export 2, Uncategorized, , , , ,

I have recently discovered the #IndieWeb.

The #IndieWeb is a decentralized means of bloggers replying to other bloggers without having to be logged into a corporately-owned, centralized social network (or “silo”, like Facebook or Twitter). It doesn’t make use of single log-ins, it doesn’t make use of having to put your “real name” on your profile.

It departs a bit from other existing initiatives of decentralized social networking services, such as Diaspora and Friendica, which try to retain a Facebook/Twitter-like user experience without the lock-in (by allowing you to install the software to host a social network site on your own server and allowing users to connect as friends and talking to each other across servers).

Instead, IndieWeb is even more decentralized than that. Technically, it relies even less on a common user interface, and it doesn’t necessarily provide for a means of “friending” or “following” another blogger on another server. Instead, the focus is on receiving notifications of replies or likes/faves from other blogs, especially those which are self-hosted.

The more that I read about it, the more I find the idea of the IndieWeb to be fascinating. It can keep much of the sort of connectivity that is sought by bloggers (say, on WordPress.com or on self-hosted WordPress sites) through social media site users without the sort of reliance upon logged-in comments or shares through first-parties such as Facebook or third parties such as Disqus and Livefyre.

But it’s pretty next level. I don’t think I can use it on WordPress.com, but if I ever move the posts from here onto a self-hosted WordPress site, I would install it just to see how many IndieWeb users would be interested.

I also wish I could import my public Facebook and Twitter posts over to a public personal blog, at least to have a backup of much of that data.

Questions from Inexperience

Can the emphasis of IndieWeb on “personal blogs” conflict with those blogs which expand into full-on “news sites” or “community blogs” (i.e., Huffington Post, TPM, Gawker, etc.)?

The latter type of blog often features the registration of users who submit post comments or lower-tier post content, while the bloggers remain separately credentialed in their ability to post first-tier content. Most news blogs may have a large community of users who are registered simply for the purpose of keeping their own comment histories lined up, or faving each others comments.

I wonder if the traffic and authorship growth of a blog from “personal” to “community” affect the functionality of an IndieWeb-capable blog.

It was either yesterday or today last year when Connie sat us all down and told us that the doctors found an anomaly in the lining of her spinal cord and brain, and that she would have to go to surgery the next day. I don’t think we celebrated the holiday, or her birthday, that year. I remember the last time she grilled in the backyard, but it was probably a sweltering Memorial Day. I drove Brandon and RJ to go see the fireworks that night. We were late. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end.