Comments on: Tumblog in WordPress - my own personal Twitter?

By: Emery

Emery — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:28:34 +0000

Hi D’arcy. My company has created what is essentially a private Twitter for people who would like to keep track of random thoughts and brainstorms without necessarily broadcasting such posts to their entire cadre of followers. t’s called the Time Log, simply enough, and keeps a feed of your thoughts which are taggable, and can also be forwarded to friends who also have timelog accounts, or to email addresses simply by entering in the tags field. It’s also available as a smartphone app if you have an account - very easy to set up. Our beta is out now - take a look and see what you think… we’d love to get feedback in order to improve the application! It’s free, of course, and the app is embeddable. You can find the Time Log at http://timelog.metanotes.com, or at http://www.the-time-log.com.

By: Qrystal

Qrystal — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:58:10 +0000

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.)

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:04:15 +0000

@will - yet another place where Drupal would make this trivial, but WordPress needs some convincing

By: Will Taylor

Will Taylor — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:59:55 +0000

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.

By: Fighting Social Media Fragmentation : The Blog Herald

Fighting Social Media Fragmentation : The Blog Herald — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:46:56 +0000

[...] It seems I have happened across at least a partial answer after reading D’Arcy’s experiments with Asides. [...]

By: dnorman

dnorman — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:28:08 +0000

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…

By: Liam Green-Hughes

Liam Green-Hughes — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:48:27 +0000

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.

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:23:47 +0000

“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.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:35:16 +0000

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…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:13:22 +0000

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.