⚙️ Inspired by Micro Thoughts
Jedda1 had a timely post this week titled Micro Thoughts - Explained that was extremely relevant to my recent blog consolidation efforts:
I post random thoughts and shorter things in various places. You can mostly find me on Mastodon these days, sporadically on micro.blog (that sometimes gets pushed to Mastodon), and these days on status.log (which also sometimes gets copied over to Mastodon). Anyways, I'm all over the place.
There are some fleeting thoughts I want to keep just because. I have my Mastodon profile set to delete after
insert amount of time hereso I want to keep a copy of it on my site.
Enter Microthoughts: a summary (copy?) of most of my posts from random places. It could be for people who don't have those platforms to see what I've been posting, but it's also mostly just for me to keep a documentation of it.
This is something I've personally struggled with since Twitter arrived on the scene in 2006. Twitter almost immediately started sucking up most of my writing juice and I lost a lot of motivation to post to my blog. I made various attempts to integrate Twitter with my WordPress blog at the time, but I was never happy with the result. Twitter also had its stupid 140-character limit up until 20172.
In the last several years I've done a lot more personal microblogging, but but I've never been completely satisfied with how it integrates with my primary blog either. The idea of curating worthwhile tweets, toots, and other micro-posts into a monthly summary post had crossed my mind, but I'd never actually tried it out before seeing Jedda put the concept into action on her blog.
I'm inspired to experiment with a similar approach going forward. September is just about wrapped up and will offer a good trial run. Once I'm satisfied with the layout and process I can start working my way through my back catalog from a few different sources. I exported all my original tweets before deleting most of them in the post-Musk era so those are an option as well.
Update: Settled on Microcosm as my blog's nomenclature for the Micro Thoughts section and exported three quarters of September 2024 from my microblog. Ended up dividing it up by week because I'm a bit too prolific for just one page per month. My microblog export process is highly manual at this point, but I'm fine with it for now. I've also done no theme work on the blog at all yet so that's something I'm going to want to look at soon as well.