elliot.my

Tag: Technology

  • Audioblog. I want to read the body of a post when browsing a blog. Why do so many blogs just list titles, requiring me to have to click one-by-one to read posts?

    I’m not sure. But I recorded a quick audioblog talking about it.

    Don’t have time to listen? I asked a LLM to turn it into a blog post:

    Most blogs show just a list of titles. Click. Read. Back. Click. Read. Back.

    I prefer seeing entire posts on one page, one after another. Just scroll and read.

    It puzzles me how many blogging platforms default to title-only lists. Why?

    Maybe it’s just my way of reading. I like scanning quickly through content, letting interesting bits catch my eye. Others might prefer a more methodical approach: carefully selecting posts from a clean list of titles.

    The title-only approach does add a certain weight to each post. When you click through to a dedicated page, it feels more substantial, like you’re about to read something significant.

    But for short posts especially, I want to just scroll and read. No clicks needed.

    Curious to hear from those who prefer the title-list approach. What am I missing?

  • Exploring Are.na. I couldn’t get my head around it when I first signed up in 2022. I’m still struggling, but I think I get it now. It’s the thinking persons Pinterest?

    I’m not a huge fan of its design. It feels very 2012 to me – with its heavy use of Helvetica and whitespace. It just doesn’t inspire my creativity.

    But feel free to follow me on there. You never know, I might find a use for it.

  • Just discovered that ⌘ + S will save your draft in the WordPress editor. Good to know.

  • The permalink structure for the posts on this blog are like: https://elliot.my/1234.

    I like it because it’s short. And this blog is for short posts. It works.

    However, the number comes from the post_id. And it just doesn’t feel very resilient if I have to backup and restore this blog on a new server, for example. In my head the post_id will be different.

    Apparently it won’t be an issue though. It’s stored in the blogs WordPress MySQL database. So if I can restore the blog and its posts, then I can restore the post_id‘s too. So I guess I’m comfortable with that.

    However, if I can’t restore the blog automatically due to some sort of awful data loss, and have to restore more manually I might be in trouble.

    Because if the structure is like https://elliot.my/2024/10/18/title-of-post it’s fairly easily to manually recreate, as long as I know the date and title of the post.

    Or let’s say I want to move this blog off WordPress onto Hugo. Hugo will easily create URLs that match, again going off the date and title.

    But with https://elliot.my/1234 I’m going to have to manually tell it what the permalink is.

    I’m probably worrying about nothing. It’s unlikely I’m going to ever manually restore this blog. If I do, I’ll probably have bigger things to worry about.

    The post_id still makes me nervous. But I’m going to keep using it, as I like the short URLs.

    One more thing. The post_id isn’t really a post ID. Every media upload and post revision/draft has a post_id too.

    My last blog post had an ID of 433. The one before that 430. As I’d obviously hit ‘Save draft’ a few times.

    A concern I had was how quickly the number would climb. If it’s the four hundreds after 28 posts and 8 days, what will the number be in 1 year? Or 5 years?

    Assuming a similar pace:

    • After one year: around 20,000.
    • After five years: around 100,000.

    I think having a six digit ID after five years is fine. I mean Twitter has 20 digits or so.

  • Dave Winer has been talking about how he’s hooked up his WordPress blog to Mastodon.1 He raved about the possibilities it opens up. But he was light about how to do actually go about setting it up.

    It seems like you need to:

    • Install ActivityPub WordPress plugin.
    • Click the checkbox of ‘Enable Blog-Profile’ in the settings of the plugin.
    • That’s it? After that it seems like it just works. For example, you can follow this elliot.my blog by searching @blog@elliot.my in Mastodon of other ActivityPub sites. Here’s the profile on Mastodon.cloud and Micro.blog.

    I’m hoping this post will show up!

    Update: this is me doing an update to see if it gets picked up by the Fediverse.

    Update 2: it only bloodly works! Not only the post – even the body of the post appears! But also the edits. The edit I’m writing right now I’m sure will be picked up.

    Update 3: Mastodon updates when I update here, but Micro.blog doesn’t. Oh well.

    1. Or more specifically ActivityPub. ↩︎

  • I’ve tried writing several email newsletters down the years. Every time I lost interest immediately.

    For me there’s just something inherently uninteresting and unexciting about newsletters. They reek of promotion and desperation.

    Blogs are a digital living room where I can share my ideas and thoughts with whoever drops by.

    And if I’m writing on the web, I want to write on the web. With things like blogrolls and reblogs, trackbacks and pingbacks, atom feeds and webmentions, via’s and hat tips.

    Blogs will always be my emotional and technological home.

  • When you review things on Plex your friends can now see them. I love this. I trust my friend’s opinion over a critic or even IMDB/RT/LB/etc.

    Blog post. Video demo.

  • I’ve only just noticed that there’s a ‘Duplicate’ tab option in Chrome. News to me!

    For me it’s still slower than copying the tabs URL and pasting it into a new tab.

    But it’s amazing how you can see something hundreds, or thousands, of times and yet never see it.