My new home on the internet
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Long story short, I’ve moved my website to Micro.blog. The path I took to get here, however, was a long one.
For a long time, I’d wanted a section of my website where I could quickly and easily add short thoughts as they came to me. The process I had for adding posts just wasn’t quick though: My website was hosted on github pages, meaning it had to be a static site. Adding a new post meant creating a new file, adding my markdown to it, pushing that change to my github repo, and waiting for the site to update. That process had a lot of friction that disincentivised me from adding smaller posts to my site.
So how was I going to solve the problem? My first idea was to embed a twitter feed into my site. That solution was simple enough, except I didn’t quite feel safe posting much of anything on twitter. Any time I made a foray onto the feed of my twitter account, I saw a lot of awful things written by some awful people (and maybe some bots). On top of this, I hated using twitter because I also saw a lot of ads everywhere I looked. Finally, after all of twitter’s recent history, I came to the conclusion that these issues would only get worse. I ended up deleting my Twitter account. So much for that idea.
Not long after, most of the people I did like following on Twitter moved to Mastodon. After some investigation I found a lot to like about Mastodon: No ads, and the process of joining a server is just complicated enough that it seems to have (for now) kept the masses away. All I saw was the posts made by the people I wanted to follow.
I pivoted my original idea to embedding a Mastodon feed on my website instead. It still wasn’t exactly an elegant solution, but it worked. I made a proof of concept and was pretty happy with it. Before I got any further though, I found Micro.blog.
Micro.blog ended up being exactly what I was looking for. I can easily add longer and shorter posts, so I no longer need to embed things I’ve posted from somewhere else. Adding photos is also as simple as just adding a post with a photo in it, and I have a dedicated photos page that they’re all automatically added to. I can still build and style my website to look and work exactly how I want it to. I can add my own url. I can use MarsEdit, a rich text editor on my Mac, to easily write and add posts (like this one). The cost for all this was comparable to my GitHub Pro subscription, which I paid for solely to run my website from a private repo.
One of the best features, however, is that Micro.blog uses ActivityPub, which means it is interoperable with Mastodon. In addition to following other Micro.blog users, I can follow and be followed by Mastodon users. By making a Micro.blog account, I’ve been able to replace my own website, twitter, and instagram, while gaining a fully functional Mastodon account.
Learning to build a website from scratch and host it myself was a really good experience, and one that I recommend to anyone learning web development. Long after the learning phase though, the time I spent tinkering with the tools I used grew to be a lot greater than the time I spent actually posting to my website. Ultimately, I’ve found that the tools don’t matter, as long as they get out of the way and allow you to create the things you want to make.