Jamie Thingelstad

What if Facebooks only goal with Threads is to damage Twitter.

In this context, Twitter looks like Fitbit and Threads like Apple Health.

Full platforms versus a feature.

My neighbors dock is not in good shape.

I love that my cousin Quinn has a blog, a micro.blog no less, and I can now see great stories from him online. 👏

I suggested to some friends that I wanted to do everything I could to keep my websites and online writing around well after I’ve died. One of them asked how I was approaching this, and what I was doing today to make this happen.

What am I doing to make it so my content online lives for as long as possible? It may be easiest to start with what I’m not doing.

1. I am not writing and publishing into a corporate database that I cannot own my words. Not your domain, not your words.
2. I am not writing for a timeline. Mostly in this context this means my writing should stand on its own. I try to avoid implying current context that a future reader will not know.
3. I am not using a database or other software at runtime to display my writing. My writing is rendered from markdown to HTML and then published. The markdown is plenty readable on its own if need be.

Now what I am doing.

1. I’m publishing with micro.blog because it meets all of my criteria, and then some. It even goes beyond. For example, when I link to an external site, micro.blog grabs an archive of that link so in the future I could reference that archive instead of the live site.
2. I publish the Weekly Thing with Buttondown which uses easy Markdown to publish.
3. I export my entire blog archive from micro.blog every 3 months to my local storage.
4. I export my Buttondown archive of the Weekly Thing every 3 months to my local storage.
5. I download my entire Pinboard archive every month. This is the source markdown that is also included in Buttondown, but this is indexed by link.

Problems to solve still.

1. All of my content can be served with any static HTTP endpoint. This could be done easily with AWS S3. However, paying for an AWS account after your death is not obvious. Possibly you can prepay for decades, but then you rely on a company. A small trust could be created that has funds to renew domain names and pay the content hosting fees for decades. That trust could be funded by future generations if they continue to see interest.
2. The solution I like the most is distributed storage with IPFS paid for via Smart Contract. I can fund a Smart Contract that can hold my ENS asset, and pay the IPFS hosting fees to maintain the data for as long as there are funds. This avoids a legal trust, and can easily receive funds via anyone on the web. You could have a simple way to keep your own archive alive.
3. Adding this content to Internet Archive is good, but I don’t want to only rely on that.
4. I consider the idea of printing all of this onto paper, or eBook, and distributing it broadly. I think that is a good backup method as well.

In short.

1. Control all aspects of what you create.
2. Keep is simple, no runtime requirements.
3. Durable hosting and figure out economonics.

This Athletic Brewing Mango Picante has some serious kick on the back end.

I got the pleasure to meet with Noah Jeffrey a couple of times in his ACE Leadership program with MnTech. It was cool to hear the things he was working through, be able to share some perspectives and experiences, and I think we both learned some things from the dialog. 🤝

I’ve been using Butt Rub for a number of years, but made my first direct purchase from their website and got this awesome t-shirt as a free gift! Great rub, great name, great shirt! 🐖🔥😍

Happy Birthday America! 🇺🇸🎉🎆

In just over a week we head to Switzerland for our hiking trip. I wanted to get a longer and harder hike in before we left so this morning Tammy and I got up early, let the kids sleep in, and went to Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve for a 5.3 mile hike with about 900 ft of elevation gain. It took us 2h 8m to finish. My shirt was like I had wore it in a shower when we got done. I brought my poles and was initially feeling silly, but after a couple of miles the trail started going up and down more and I was happy to have them. 😅 Also on Strava.

Enjoying this Athletic Brewing Apricot Farmhouse. Refreshing and crisp flavor. 🍻

Thanks to very detailed directions from Matt Langford (@mtt) I was able to add NIP-05 Verification to my micro.blog hosted site with a custom plugin to create the nostr.json link.

Current POV.

I love watching the Damselflies hover and cling to the Big Bluestem in the morning.

I’ve been having more fun on micro.blog lately in large part to the excellent work of Matt Langford and his delightful Tiny Theme for Micro.blog.

When I saw Tiny Theme I instantly appreciated the design and support for all the capabilities that micro.blog provides. I liked how Matt had built in support for some of the most popular plug-ins, including Sven Dahlstrand’s great collection. Plus Tiny Theme is super fast. I switched my site to it and have been having a great time.

Matt has pushed new features and improvements on a weekly basis (or more) since release. It has been fun to see the continued improvements. He recently started integrating Tinylytics, a new service by Vincent Ritter, and Matt’s enthusiasm for the service, and built-in support coming in Tiny Theme, was enough to get me to sign up for a paid account.

Great blogging platforms have these wonderful developer communities that form around them. I’ve hosted my blog on several different technologies, and the one thing I miss about WordPress is the massive (almost too massive) community of themes and plugins built around it.

But no blogging platform has developed an economically supported ecosystem around it. I think that is an opportunity.

Matt has a PayPal link in his Tiny Theme documentation which I was happy to see and use to send a Thank You. That is fine, but it is hardly the way to support an on-going effort like maintaining a theme.

The introduction of Tiny Theme added a lot of value to my micro.blog experience. Not just for the service directly, but also for other plugin developers too. I’d love to support a Community Fund to continue to support the development of additional themes and plugins.

Could we have a micro.blog Community Fund? Micro.blog already has different tiers of service. Imagine if I could “upgrade” with a $50/year “Community Fund” add-on. Those funds would go to micro.blog, and then be distributed to theme and plugin developers to help make the ecosystem even better.

Distribution of funds would need some thought, and should be more editorial and algorithmic. You would not want to game a system of plugin developers seeking installs to drive funding. And you would want to fund things that have no usage yet. But creating an economic system to drive community innovation would be a great step to a sustainable, independent, and thriving platform still at human scale.

Maybe Micro.blog creator Manton will find this intriguing. 😎

I’m trying some changes to my feeds. I’ve been a happy user of Feedbin for years and am going to give the Feedbin app a go on my phone instead of Unread. I’m also trying the newest Airshow which is also by Feedbin and syncs with the reader instead of Overcast.

Cigar time. 🔥

The ice cream truck always brings a smile, no matter what your age. 🍦