I’m determined to give this micro.blog thing a proper hoon, while I’m on my free trial. But experimenting with it has already made me realise just how much I’d love to consolidate my Internet presence on one platform that plays nice with others. I love the microblog concept, the idea of frictionless quick blogging and having a repository of my stuff that I control. I can see myself keeping it, for these reasons and as a way to syndicate my posts across the Indieweb.
But consolidation remains the dream. Currently, I have a long tail of Internet projects both current and abandoned that I would very, very much like to clean up, across a truly upsetting number of platforms. There’s:
- my essentially abandoned webcomic, www.cakeburger.com (Wordpress)
- my old blog that I’d like to turn into a portfolio site, www.joshuadrummond.com (Wordpress)
- my bad news newsletter, the Bad Newsletter, www.badnewsletter.com (Ghost)
- my self-improvement obsession newsletter, www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com (Ghost)
- my art shop, tworuru.com (Shopify)
I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.
Now. Not only is the experience of keeping up with all that web stuff full of friction, it’s expensive. There’s no way to run two newsletters out of Ghost, so I have to pay a flat fee for both of them, and Shopify of course has a monthly cost. Both the Wordpress sites are self-hosted so the only thing I am paying for them is the hosting and domain name costs.
What I’d really like, I’ve realised, is a way to keep all that stuff straight in one container, if it’s at all possible. I’m aware that this is the Web and that there’s always going to be a need to straddle different technologies (and, I have to admit, a lot of my trouble stems from the fact that I’m a nerd who wants to do advanced nerd stuff who also never learned to code.) But I’d still love to be able to run and host my two newsletters from within one platform, without having to pay for two separate instances. As long as I am fantasising, I’d like to be able to do the same with my webcomic, and why not my online store as well? It’d be fantastic to draft a post for the Cynic’s Guide, knowing it was going to appear on the correct domain name, be sent out to the right email subscribers, and then upload a comic that also appears in the right spot and doesn’t get sent out to a bunch of subscribers. Then upload a new artwork to the shop and have that appear in the right place, because why not. And of course all this stuff has to play nice on the emerging indieweb: there needs to be webmentions and social web / Fediverse stuff included from the get-go. Oh, and microblogging, because I want to lean into things that keep me creating, rather than consuming. The ratio of consumption to creation has been wildly out of whack for the last 20 years and I’m slowly moving the needle in the right direction, which is of course what the Cynic’s Guide is all about, fundamentally.
So. Am I dreaming? Can I do what I want with some kind of mongrel Wordpress/WooCommerce implementation or do I need to go underground for a few years, learn to code, and build the Temple OS of mad web service convergence that suits my own, highly idiosyncratic needs?
Let me know what you think: I need to understand if I’m just being crazy, and if so, how much.
As a reward for reading that rant, here is my cat.
