Re-introducing myself to blogging
I’ve been blogging for well over 20 years and found that each time I set out to start blogging the website is usually the thing that stops me from being productive. I wanted to see if I could remove the fiddly bits of a website and just use something that is not only purpose built, but also doesn’t have a whole lot of fiddly bits to mess with, so I moved my website from my self hosted WordPress to a service called Micro.blog. This isn’t my first time using Micro.blog, but it is definitely the first time that I’ve set out to use it as my main blogging platform for my personal website previous attempts, were me just messing around with it, and, I really want to see how I can add this to my routine, which I did so many years ago when I first started out writing on the Internet. Back, then it was on livejournal.com and using that service allowed for me to be a part of a local community and be a part of the community on LJ as well. With micro.blog what’s nice about it is it’s tied to the Fediverse so places like mastodon and such can interact with my content and I can interact with other peoples content from here as well.
The Goal
My goal of this project is to see if I can start blogging at least once a week and see if I can start putting my thoughts to digital paper because looking at my old blog posts I can see that I was having a lot of fun doing it. Recently every time I go to write a blog post on my website there’s always some WordPress plug-n or an update to a theme or some other thing that’s distracting me and I’m hoping by using a service like this I remove that entire piece from the equation. I’ll still be using WordPress for all my other websites, but this one’s definitely going to be a very stripped down and basic thing and I hope it becomes something that is part of my normal routine.
What I've noticed from importing my old content
Micro.blog uses Hugo blogging engine as the basis of its setup. I exported my content from WordPress into an XML file and then imported it into Micro.blog and its doing it's very best to see about matching up content, images and seeing what it can do to wrangle the content into the Hugo platform. I'm impressed so far. With other 2600 posts its needing to digest and convert it's taking its time working though it. So what have I noticed from the logs that auto update as its importing? Wow I spent a lot of time participating in so many internet trends like NaBloPoMo and other blogging things like it.
Post Formats
WordPress is currently going though a bit of a rewrite with its block editor and the entire dashboard as well. With this comes some old ways of doing thing and some new ways of doing things as well. One of which that I always loved it various post formats like quotes, links, images etc. Micro.blog has these kinda and I'm excited to use them. It ends up with this import of content from my old websites I shared a lot of links and YouTube video as blog posts which is awesome but I didn't include much context around. This is fine but something like Micro.blog should allow me to just share links here and they come up inline with the rest of the posts no content around it needed.
Have you done something like this? I’d love to hear about it.
