The algorithmic internet is why the world has gone to hell.
I’ve had an infrequently updated blog since 2003 or so and I’m interested in keeping it alive, if for no other reason than I value human-generated and curated writing and photography, and I miss it on the increasingly algorithmic internet.
My first blog used a “blogging” tool called Greymatter, the very first of it’s kind. That was quickly followed by a move to Moveable Type, which I found more interesting than the newly arrived WordPress. Then I moved from Moveable Type to Perch, and eventually Perch Runway, but lost interest in that platform when it began it’s long decline and eventual sale. At the time I thought it was amazing.
And now I’m toying with Blot, which takes files stored in a directory on Dropbox or Google Drive and turns them into posts. It uses the very simple Mustache templating engine, is quite simple in concept, has great support for Markdown (as well as plain text files or even Word files), a decent number of starter themes, and costs $5/month. The nicest thing of all is that all of your files are stored on a local folder, so you’ll never lose control of your content, as I did when Perch Runway suddenly stopped working because of compatibility problems with a newer version of PHP.
We’ll see where this leads, but Blot is the first tool that I’ve seen that has made me want to move away from Instagram/FB/Twitter/Threads in order to take back control over the ownership of what I post.
“…until this very last week Republicans were spending the majority of their time not fighting against antisemitism, or any other hate speech, or taking any other action in the name protecting a marginalized group of people, from hate speech. Instead, they were fighting for the inclusion of marginalizing speech as an absolutely necessary and vital aspect of what must be allowed in an open marketplace of ideas, in the name of defending free speech.”
