Housekeeping
- Began with free version, ca. 2007; was an improvement over Blogger (by then owned by Google).
- Ads become too obtrusive, so paid to remove them.
- Began using site not only to blog, but also as a professional signboard.
- Eventually upgraded to business plan to meet customization needs (add plugins).
Blog categories again: One overarching theme seems to be justice, although I haven’t made it explicit. Maybe it’s time to change that. Merely adding the word as a category won’t work, but perhaps I could start by reflecting on the theme and how it manifests in a number of past posts.
I’ve been tweaking the blog’s categories again, and not all posts are caught up with the changes. This happens with living documents like the weblog or the digital garden.
I’ve eliminated a lot of categories that I’d rather keep as tags, if my host Micro.blog had tags. While I wait to see if that ever changes, I need to reduce the number of categories still further. I had let their number grow because of the lack of tags, but it’s time to rein them in a bit.
The historyofknowledge.net domain is no longer live. Use historyofknowledge.hypotheses.org instead.
I’m in the process of checking and changing links on this site that point to the old domain. I’m also removing Twitter links still lurking in my markup.
Am futzing around with my blog categories again.
I've Started a 'News Sites' Links Page. Here's Why.
Local and regional newspapers have been dying at an alarming rate. At the same time, the 2024 election has underscored significant failings in the best of our big newspapers: bothsidesism, clickbait headlines, groupthink and superficial analysis, sexism, casual racism, transphobia, pedantic fact-checking that doesn’t consider substance, uncritical repetition of lies from the temperamental orange guy and those who have sworn fealty to him, sanewashing, interference with editorial decisions by billionaire owners, and so on. While there’s currently no living entirely without such outlets, relying on them exclusively isn’t an option. That’s why I’ve started to gather links to other sources as I run across them. I am sharing these on a page called news sites in a section called lists.
I resurrected a couple categories that had gone the way of the dinosaurs when I moved from WordPress to Micro.blog – language learning and language matters. I also added deportation. Finally, I marked some of my old political posts with the fascism category, sometimes removing politics in the process.
Am still bringing in very old posts, but have stopped noting which blog I originally posted these on. Should that ever matter, it’s covered in a new colophon entry on my About page: the Wayback Machine and the names and links to the archived blogs.
Looks like pieces of my old “Commonplacing” tumblelog were saved by the Wayback Machine too. I see quotes that meant something to me in 2009.
Following up on my efforts last Sunday, I began looking at 2009 posts saved by the Wayback Machine and imported my inauguration post to start with. I added a Washington, DC, category for that one, and I’ll apply that to other posts later on. I should also have my Twitter archive somewhere to pull from, though I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t turn up.
I am adding some old blog posts that were largely saved by the Internet Archive. I’m doing this by hand in order to review links and to skip posts that no longer have a context. I started this effort because I remembered blogging a little about politics in 2008, and I wanted to bring that in for perspective in these fraught times.
Evening update: I made it through 2008. (I forgot how angry I was at McCain in this campaign.) There will be at least a few more bits and bobs from 2009 to add later.
My Micro.blog-hosted website is not working this evening. Seems to be another SSL connection issue on the server’s end. At least I found the status page and know that it’s not specific to my blog.
Shared Notes: Why Move from Wordpress.com to Micro.blog?
My history with WordPress.com
Comments Back On (Tentatively)
I activated a second feature on my Micro.blog-hosted site that I had turned off years ago while still on WordPress: Comments. They had become more trouble than they were worth, and there was always the once useful bird site, where real conversations could transpire. But those were different times.
In a moment of optimism, I have chosen to believe that the sign-in requirement with Mastodon, BluSky, or Micro.blog will reduce potential friction for me because I’ve encountered a lot less of it on these federating platforms. But time will tell. Right now, I can unmark a problematic comment so it doesn’t appear, but only after the comment is initially posted. (The developer behind Micro.blog is considering making prior-approval an option.) I also have the usual mute, block, and report options.
Next step: seeing what happens—and what I might still need to do—if I get any responses from other sites via webmention. I’m definitely enjoying what the IndieWeb community makes possible, but I wish its tools and documentation were more accessible to non-programming folk. I can deal with modern HTML and CSS, but that’s as far as it goes.
I still need to work on the styling (colors, fonts, etc.) of this version of my website, but I’m becoming satisfied with it’s basic organization and functionality.
Cleaning up my blog posts, which I’ve moved to Micro.blog, reveals just how much extra unnecessary garbage markup WordPress.com has dumped into my posts. Yikes! Still lots more to go. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for my domain to point to the new site, and I’m trying to figure out how to place my blog on a custom page, among many other things. There’s a learning curve with the new system, but I’m getting there.
I am migrating my website from WordPress.com to Micro.blog in order to simplify its maintenance, reduce costs, and streamline my online communication. Please pardon my many hiccups during this transition.
Wordpress no longer supported the blog theme I was using, so I decided to start from scratch with a minimalist block theme (Livro) that allows full site editing. I’ve got most of the kinks ironed out now, though it still needs tweaking on mobile phones, in particular. More news and content will follow soon.
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