Post 3 out of 31

I admit I’ve not been very good at posting to my micro blog despite my best Blaugust intentions. I blame World of Warcraft for this. I got sucked into Mists of Pandaria Classic over the weekend and time disappeared. Then Monday was K’s birthday and I’m not sure what happened yesterday, but I’m sure there was WoW.

But no matter: I just need to post 31 times. I won’t count the highlights so I’m now at 2 out of 31 posts. And with this post I’ll be at 3 out of 31. Catching up already.

While I said that I would listen to some podcasts while leveling my MoP gathering skills, I ended up watching a three-hour deep dive into the mystery of Dyatlov Pass instead. I first read about this tragic incident many years ago and became fascinated by some of the more unexplainable details. I’ve since read/watched anything I could find on the subject and this latest deep dive was probably the best and most concise retelling of the events I’d encountered in a while. The mystery has been “solved” many times over the years – I believe an avalanche is the most widely accepted explanation, but that only explains why they may have left the tent in a hurry. It does not explain everything that happened after.

(For the record I don’t believe it was a UFO or a yeti).

Happy to report that my blogging has inspired my friend Lish to pick up LiveJournaling again. Despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise, she seems determined to remain on LJ. Alas.

For anyone else who may feel inspired to pick up online journaling, here’s a great list comparing the different platforms. Many offer free hosting tiers, and it’s a great way to support the IndieWeb.

Current services I use:

• Magic Pages (Ghost) - Highly recommend! This is what I use for my main site and it makes running a Ghost site really simple. I fully intend to grab a lifetime license one of these months.
• Micro.blog - Also highly recommend. If running a simple blog is all you want, for $1/month you get everything you need.

I mentioned this before but I do also really like Bear Blog. You don’t need your own domain or anything. I’m not currently using it but if you want a super fast and simple blog I think that’s a great alternative. I set up a blog there just to test it and it was very quick.

And if you’re nostalgic for LiveJournal, Dreamwidth is where I migrated my old LJ to. You can just move everything over, comments and all. I deleted mine back in December/January when I was cleaning up my online presence, but if anyone sets up shop there I’ll sign up again.

On the subject of personal blogging, I’m currently reading Molly White’s “POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world.

What is POSSE?

Short for Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere, it’s not a protocol or even a piece of software, but rather a philosophy. Rather than publishing a post onto someone else’s servers on Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky or Threads or whichever microblogging service will inevitably come along next, the posts are published locally to a service you control. At that point, the rest is simple (if not easy): plugging in whichever social media sites you desire, and syndicating the posts through them either by copying the post there directly, or publishing a snippet with a link back to the original source.

The idea is that you maintain a personal hub and send your content from there to whatever social media platform you like. That way you’re never at the mercy of third-party’s spaces.

I’ve been trying that out with my notes by cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon.

Despite being on the Internet since the days of AOL I feel like I’m starting over from scratch building an online presence these days. I like it that way, though. I believe that the people who are meant to find you will find you with or without an algorithm.

In other news: my order of legal pads arrived (see photo). I decided I want to write Project: Midnight by hand. I find that paper is less distracting than typing but we’ll see how it goes.

I think that about covers today’s post.

For more ramblings, keep an eye on my notes. See you next week for another exciting post.