Post for 19 April 2024

Have you given much thought to the Web 2.0 services that you use? Tonight I was reading Web2 Collapsing Under It’s Own Weight. Rather than post on Facebook I prefer to create content on my personal server and then add it to my social sites. I have begun to create tools to enable POSSE for my blog.

It is easier to just hit the button "What’s on your mind?" on Facebook or whatever you use to stay in touch with your friends. The downside is that content is locked inside a single "walled garden". It remains there, like a fluorocarbon in the atmosphere.

Yes, there are hosting services that allow you to add content to the web. Your data resides on their servers, and you may find your content mixed with that of advertisers. These blog or "newsletter" providers typically provide a built-in editor to compose each posting. If you edit and publish on the same platform you are locked into the platform. I route around this by writing my posts on my personal computer, then I run a formatter that converts my post into HTML that can be copied to my web server.

An interesting platform is WordPress. You can host your blog on WordPress servers, on any provider that supports the WordPress stack, or on a rented virtual machine. You can even run it on an old computer in your home. You can migrate your site from one instance to another, and there are plenty of open source extensions available. I think this is a compelling ecosystem for anyone that wants to spend their time writing rather than coding.