Tumblog in WordPress - my own personal Twitter?
Posted by: dnorman in general, tags: asides, wordpressI’ve been playing around with the idea of publishing all of my content in one place - what would that look like? What would be lost, with respect to the social network effects that exist in other hosted services? It seems strange to be posting blog entries here, short updates to Twitter, photos to Flickr, etc… I’ve been wondering what it would look like if I just posted everything here, and then looked at ways to get it out, to rebuild the social network in a distributed, decentralized way.
One thing I’ve been struggling with is how absolutely trivial this would be if I was still running Drupal. Define some content types, slap in some templates for them, and decide which nodes get promoted to front page. Done. But WordPress doesn’t work like that. There’s not a clean and easy way to define something like a “Twitter Update” content type, or a “Photo” content type.
Well, actually, there is a clean and easy way. But it involves adding a couple of plugins. First, I added the AsideShop plugin. It’s pretty cool, and lets you define what are essentially templates for each of the categories on a WordPress site - superficially emulating the different node templates you can create in Drupal. I created an “aside” category, and told AsideShop to display it differently than the default posts. But… If I was to keep posting Twitter-like updates, my RSS feed would be pretty polluted with garbage that 99% (or more) of the remaining subscribers just wouldn’t care about.
Here is a screenshot of what asides look like currently:
The AsideShop configuration looks like this:
So, I added the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, and told it to remove everything in the “aside” category from the main site feed. Easy peasy.
All I have to do is write a regular post, and select the “aside” category. Everything else is handled automagically. I can expose all of the asides on their own page, and through their own feed. Wonder what I’ll wind up doing with that…
Entries (RSS)
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I’m struggling to understand the logic of why you want to do this. Publish different formats in different locations and let people aggregate if they want to - or aggregate it all yourself on friendfeed and publish the RSS from that?
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
It may be nothing more than a thought experiment. But lately I’ve been growing more uncomfortable with posting content on third party services. Why should I have to post content on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc… when I can post it all just as effectively here? Why should I use a re-aggregation service to pull scattered bits of my stuff back into one place (on someone else’s server) when it could all be managed in one place to begin with?
Really, I’m just wanting to poke at the edges of what it means to take control of what I publish in a real sense. What would it look like if an individual posted content in one place and then repurposed it from there, rather than posting it in a dozen or so separate services and trying to bring it back together?
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
It would look like a mess, as you said (having to filter out your tweets). We’re waving at each other while traveling in opposite directions, since I’m currently considering abandoning my own servers and putting all my stuff in the cloud.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
The funny thing is, if I was still running on Drupal it would be completely clean, unmessy, and easy
My discomfort with relying on The Cloud is the ephemeral nature of it all. If I value any of what I create, the only way to ensure I continue to have access to it is to control it myself. Flickr could disappear. Twitter could vanish. WordPress.com could be shut down. As long as I am managing my own content (and backing it up myself) it’s mine, and I’ll be able to use it however I want.
With that said, though, I realize that probably 99% of what I publish could disappear without missing it at all. But that 1% makes the exercise worthwhile.
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:35 pm
It will be interesting to see if the effectiveness really is the same once you stop using Twitter… unless I am misreading what you write above, it appears that eventually you will be posting as asides here instead of there? I’m guessing the primary difference (exposed vs hidden following/connection mechanisms) isn’t particularly important to you…
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:23 pm
“Small Pieces Bound at Home?” - I’m wondering too on the why, but am listening. You can play more what ifs- what if an asteroid falls on your ISP? What if a volcano erupts in downtown Calgary?
The two plugins are intriguing, but I can pretty much do the same by making multiple templates, hacking the RSS templates, some custom queries. You can get close to custom content type stuff using custom fields, but not quite as varied as the drupal way.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:48 am
I think what you are doing makes a lot of sense. It seems to me that with web hosting being so cheap and powerful software like Drupal and Wordpress being available as open source that it is maybe not worth having to deal with lots of different websites each with their own conditions, charging structure, accounts and quirks just to make content available that you could easily host yourself. It will be interesting to see how you get on.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I don’t have a clear idea of what I’m wanting to explore here, but with all of the thinking I’ve been doing about individuals controlling their own publishing, it felt like it was time to start exploring what that really meant. If sharecropping services are to be avoided, what are the alternatives?
Of course, I’m still posting to Twitter and Flickr etc… and am not sure if I’ll stop that. The community is too valuable to just throw it away - but I might change what I post, and where I do it.
@alan - the point is that you shouldn’t have to hack anything to be able to properly manage your own content. I’m exploring what it might look like if the model was refined, and regular non-geeks were to adopt it. It’s already much more hackish than I’d like, though, by requiring plugins and editing templates. The Drupal sirens are calling me yet again…
@liam - it’s not ready for prime time, to be sure. but I need to so some more thinking/playing with this stuff for a bit…
April 25th, 2008 at 4:46 am
[...] It seems I have happened across at least a partial answer after reading D’Arcy’s experiments with Asides. [...]
April 25th, 2008 at 7:59 am
thanks for the tip on this, D’Arcy - one thing noted, the Asides templating is limited to the homepage display - the same posts in Archive or Category view default to the formating of the default theme. Would be great if the Asides template were to extend to these other views as well.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:04 am
@will - yet another place where Drupal would make this trivial, but WordPress needs some convincing
May 12th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Very intriguing! I’ve been wanting to bring more of my stuff “home” from “the cloud” … such as my twitter posts, some of which I’m really quite proud of. I wouldn’t want to leave twitter though, I’m more up for cross-posting.
Anyways, with the concepts you’ve described above, I am closer to seeing how it can be done! So thanks! (I’ve got several other projects ahead of it in the queue, but I’ll post back once I’ve got it put together.)