This post was archived from blog.jenigrant.com

The goal: to create a little something I can use to centralize my writing / blogging / social media under one roof. Keep it as lightweight and dependency-free as possible, in order to create an easily compressible repo I can replicate where ever I'd like. No more corporate centralization of the stream of text, images, and video. No more losing shit to the aether of corporate Internet and the whims of other people. You know what I haven't lost over the years? My website.

Step one: get to writing. Plain text (well, Markdown) and a very basic site generator. Eleventy will work for now but because I am Highly Opinionated™ I want to Frankenroll something else together with it and make it my own.

I'm not exactly starting with an empty file structure with Eleventy but it plays to my strengths. Glitch is exactly as much networking and server configuration as I want to be doing right now (exactly none) but I've never trusted black box configuration so eventually that'll be somewhere else under my control.

I have a list of to-dos, one off tasks that should be easy enough to implement (meaning there's code to copy from elsewhere). Things to move in fully, a few neat Javascript tricks under my sleeve, a template based on what I've already built. The more interesting stuff I'll publish.

Step two: work to integrate into social media, with a focus on ActivityPub and federation. RSS and the usuals. At first I just want the basics, push a 500 character summary to my various social media accounts. I'd like to integrate Shuttlecraft to make it so I can both write long-form and short-form in the same place.

Comments, probably never self-hosted. I have an idea of establishing an "offical" social media thread and using that as a comment section of sorts, then use an API(s) to make it visible on the original post. (Edit: it already exists, nice!)

Step three: Keep writing. There's the trick. I have no doubt of volume; consistency is somewhat a problem. I suppose if I just keep doing it here it'll add up. Particularly as this isn't meant for an "audience." If anon reads — hello anon, how's it going? — anon is a welcome guest but anon is also just that. Anon.

Am Reading: Fairy Tale by Stephen King. About halfway through and finding it uncharacteristially bland.

Am Listening: "Hi Ren". Absolutely phenomenal.