Blogkeeping
A list of the little online jobs I’ve been knocking off my to-do list this week:
I moved Mastodon instance
I’d been on Mastodon.online for a number of years, but always intended to move off of it at some point - get onto a smaller, less generic server. I took advantage of omg.lol’s Valentine’s Day sale to jump over to Social.lol, as I noticed that’s where a lot of the accounts I was recently interacting with were based and it had a good vibe. Plus - support a cool Open Web service!
The switching process was “interesting”; the Mastodon.online side of it wasn’t working initially, so I had half the steps done at first and had to complete things the following morning. I also did not expect the “follower migration” step to bombard me with “Account followed you” notifications, as it was a migration, but it sure did! Otherwise it was pretty simple. The hardest part was probably re-configuring my cross-posting.
But it’s all done now. I’m using it as an opportunity to reset what and who I follow, so if I was following you before, and haven’t immediately followed you back, it’s because I’m manually adding people instead of importing the export file.
My micro blogs now have a consistent look and feel
It had started to bug me how wildly inconsistent my micro blogs were looking. In part this was due to me picking a default theme on a whim when setting up the sites in Micro.blog, but I never went back to fix it. Well, I finally found the oomph to do it.
I used Matt Langford’s Tiny Theme for Micro.blog because it has a really neat “microhook” system to make customising the templates easier without making upgrades harder. Then I took the styles from my main blog and mashed everything together until it looked like it was somewhat coherent to look at. The typography and “look and feel” should at least be familiar enough, even if it’s not 100% the same across platforms. I can make further tweaks some time in the future.
Buy Me A Coffee?
In 20+ years of blogging I’ve never put up a paywall or asked for subscriptions. I’m not sure I’ve ever even put up ads. I’m not about to start now. But I have setup a Buy Me A Coffee page out of curiosity, as I’d seen many of the people I follow link to similar platforms from their sites. To be clear, I don’t expect anyone to donate anything, ever - but if they do, I’ll be grateful, and I’ll put it towards the next bag of ground coffee from the local roasters.
Links to the Buy Me A Coffee page will be displayed at the bottom of blog posts on the web, across all my sites, and the site footer of this site, but won’t appear in feeds.