I’m no stranger to micro-blogging. I used to have a Tumblr blog for many years, but fell out of love with that place eventually. Not for lack of stuff to share, by any means. No, Tumblr lost me because it is actually quite hard work to do long-form blogging on there, and if you start a post in Markdown and save it as a draft, it gets converted to HTML. Fun! (Not.)
(And then Tumblr got gobbled up by Yahoo, which in turn got gobbled up by Verizon and stitched together with the remnants of AOL to form Oath. Possibly a reference to what passed a lot of people’s lips when they heard that news.)
And I’m no stranger to Micro.Blog, either. I backed it when it was on Kickstarter several years ago, but my usage fizzled out after a while. Mainly because Real Life was busy kicking my butt around that time.
Anyway, I decided to give it another go, and it clicked with me. So much so that I’ve opted for a paid plan so I can have that micro-blog as a subdomain of this site. You can find it at thoughts.alanralph.co.uk—at some point I will work on getting it integrated more with this place.
What I like about Micro.Blog is that you’re not thrust straight into the feed of everyone’s recent posts when you log in. You see your recent posts first, and then you can go look at what other people have been posting. It’s a blogging platform that has social features at a bonus, whereas Tumblr was more of a social network that you could sort of use for blogging.
The site itself does a good job as a basis for blog-writing, but it also has apps for various platforms so you can write offline and post when you’re ready. (Including for Macs, joy!) And there is support available now in several third-party blogging tools, including my tool of choice, MarsEdit.
Micro-blogging allows me to quickly fire out some thoughts about stuff I’ve been doing during the day. And it’s getting me into the habit of blogging something every day. More to the point, blogging rather than putting it inside the walled garden of Facebook.
Some of the things I’ve posted over there may get fleshed out more and end up as longer posts here. We’ll see how things work out.