Over the last year or so, I have been sending whatsapp status updates fairly frequently. A friend recently asked me if something changed with me over the years 😆*. Well, I have no idea! But come to think of it, there was a time I used to post updates on facebook. Somehow, facebook has mostly subsided to the background over the years. There still exists a friend or two there, but most have moved to whatsapp.
The issue with whatsapp status updates is they stay only for about 24 hours. Well, my status updates are less about the feels – well, they are about the feels and music too – but I also end up sharing (possibly?) informative youtube videos or news or anything interesting I find on the web. I myself sometimes find the need to refer back to something but only to have lost it. Essentially, status updates to me are a form of public diary that can often times be worth revisiting.
Somehow I haven’t been able to integrate twitter or linkedin updates in my day to day life. LinkedIn is anyways not suitable for all updates. There is the Fediverse, but I think it needs a separation between community-servers and user-authentication-servers. Without it, it feels a inexorably fragmented and not worth the effort to me. Instagram is image centric, while my content is not. Threads is nice, but I’m learning it doesn’t play nice with users who only have Instagram installed. There there are other small and large platforms, but who knows if they will still be there in another decade. Wordpress is okay for long-form content, but it is still very clunky.
As a last resort, this is an attempt at static site based microblogging. I write my posts in a simple text editor, commit and push the changes to github, and they are converted to the site that you see. This is all powered by Hugo, in particular, the Hugo Theme Stack designed by Jimmy Cai and supported by a 100+ contributors(!). In recent years, I’m definitely falling in love with hugo! If you have a website whose primary purpose is to perform one-way information dissemination from you to your audience, with no requirements for you to collect audience data, handle their logins and all, definitely check out Hugo and its wide collection of themes. The installation and maintenance is remarkably smooth!
The idea of using a text editor to make a simple post is fairly unappealing, so I’d be interested in seeing how this plays out for me. But the current theme has a ton of options. Particularly, tagging, since my content can be fairly disarrayed. So, you can simply click on the tags to see if there is something that interests you. And let’s see how this plays out.
* I just discovered, that emacs has an M-x emoji-insert command that has a tooon of options 😱!
** Well, this turned out to be long. But I promise, future posts will be short 🙃