Scribbles, site hosting, hospitals and 'Bolton is Massive'
In this weeks update I talk a little about weekly updates, probably a lot about my future plans for using Scribbles, web hosting, and the indieWeb more generally, about Vickie's adventure at the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital, and talk through some of the content on my site this week.
Scribbles
Vincent very kindly let me in to the Scribbles beta a few weeks back,
and though I didn't really have a plan for Scribbles, I immediately
obtained a lifetime membership.
I did toy with using
Scribbles for hosting my main website. Things is though, as nice an
interface as it is to write and read in, and though I'm not so precious
about my '1987' claret Hugo theme, its just not the right platform for
that. More limited than micro.blog in functionality, I suspect that the
amount of images in some of my posts would make Vincent's accountant
cry, and the inability to style them into a gallery would just frustrate
me. Wrong tool for that job.
My site is incredibly
eclectic. I talk about Burnley FC, writing code, occasionally about
health and safety or fire safety, playing 20-40 year old video games on
modern MacOS machines, any other football stadiums, train stations or
motorway services! that I manage to visit. Seriously, who wants to read
all of that shit?
So I'm going to use Scribbles on my main
site to provide a kind of weekly summary of everything happening on my
site. A newsletter, but one that does not offend your inbox, or overrun
your feed reeder.
Hosting
While I've been really happy with micro.blog's hosting, and I think that
the recent expansion of the premium package is exceptional value, I
already have reseller hosting that I pay for to host a couple of
projects on. So I don't need micro.blog per se, and a year in its not a
community I really feel part of. I can have most all of the the exact
same conversations that I have there through indieweb.social on
Mastodon. For that reason I may well switch the conversation in that
direction and cross post - my site ceasing to be an activityPub actor in
its own right.
I could theoretically just host my own Hugo
site on my existing server, however the additional friction that would
introduce, particularly in posting galleries and images would be
painful. It would though open up the possibility to open up the yaml
frontmatter, and to do much more intelligent stuff with content. I'm
not going in that direction though, I don't feel that it would be very
enjoyable, and doesn't really fit with my existing workflow.
I played about yesterday with spinning up a Wordpress install, and
reimporting my site using the various micro.blog exports. It went
horribly badly. I despise Wordpress, it feels horribly bloated even
stripped back to the bare bones. The import coped dreadfully with
untitled microposts, and media import was really hit and miss. I'm also
struggling to get excited about messing around with Wordpress custom
fields and templating. I'll leave that to others.
So what I
think I'm going to do is to go back to 2014, and how I built a site that
I was really proud of at the time, but didn't really take off -
exploringwildplaces.co.uk. The site was awesome, but for a number of
reasons the project did not evolve as I wanted it to. From what I
remember the site had geolocated locations, with custom fields storing
and processing data relevant to the content site. So mountains
contained data about their height, lakes on their depth, and so on. That
site was lightning fast given that it essentially served cached static
data, and was built in a content management framework called Processwire.
So I've spent
a little time over the last few days working out how to build a field
and template structure from scratch, and thinking about what that would
need to look like for my project.