Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

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Listening to whatever’s playing on Apple’s livestream, with less than ten minutes before the event should start. Gotta see the new goodies (new iPhone X, Apple Watch) and then wait for the usual round of post-event dueling “Apple is the messiah/is clueless and doomed” roundups!

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Thanks to @brentsmmons for pointing out the URL for an RSS feed of your micro.blog timeline: https://micro.blog/feeds/USERNAME.json. (Also, hooray for resurrecting NetNewsWire!)

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Leaning ever closer to closing down my Twitter account once I’ve passed on the keys to the Norwescon social media accounts. Between their inconsistent application of rules and their neutering of third-party clients, it’s harder to care about staying.

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First Facebook cuts off posts from external sources, and now Twitter’s crippled any third-party clients. Even after years of talk of how social media is adversely affecting our culture, I didn’t really expect the platforms themselves to be so invested in driving users away.

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Interesting side effect to Facebook killing the ability to mirror content from outside and my mirroring not just my blog, but also (not all but) many random links and tweets to Tumblr: my Tumblr is probably my most comprehensive online presence right now.

Another move away from Facebook

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Well, crud. Just got an email from WordPress with notification that Facebook has notified them that “starting August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles.”

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been working (not always successfully, but it’s been the goal) on reducing how much content I post directly to Facebook’s walled garden. Instead, I’ve been using various services to automatically pipe text and link posts from Twitter and my blog and photo posts from Instagram (which, as it’s owned by Facebook, I’ve been scaling back on) and my blog to Facebook. That way, I own my content, but all of my Facebook contacts can still see it.

With this change, though, it looks like that’s not going to be an option as of Wednesday. My options will likely be:

  1. Post things to Facebook. Pro: Facebook contacts can see everything. Con: Posts don’t exist outside of Facebook.

  2. Manually cross-post anything I post outside of Facebook to Facebook, either by copy-and-pasting everything, or manually posting links to the outside source. Pro: Posts exist in both places. Con: Takes longer to post anything, royal pain in the butt.

  3. Post things to the non-Facebook sources as I have been, and they just don’t show up here. Pro: Easiest and means I have control over my content. Con: Facebook contacts won’t see it unless they actually follow me on Twitter and/or check my blog (either manually or through an RSS reader of some sort) (and unfortunately, for many or most people, learning how to follow people outside of Facebook just isn’t a priority; if it’s not on Facebook in some way, it doesn’t exist).

Right now, I’m thinking there’s a non-zero chance that my Facebook contacts may start seeing less from me on here because of this change. I’m sure I’ll still be reading through, liking, and commenting (for the near future, at least), because the reality is that, for good and for ill, this is where most of my connections to many of my friends near and far exist. Posts from me may be increasingly rare, though.

Some reminder links:

My blog is my primary online home.

The easiest way to follow my blog (and many other blogs and news sources) is through an RSS reader; for ease-of-use and low cost (it’s free to start and offers mobile apps), I recommend Feedly.

I’m on Twitter.

I’m also on micro.blog (a “microblogging” site that conceptually is somewhere between Twitter and traditional blogging, with the focus on short-form posts, but also with the ability to include long-form posts and optionally mirror them to WordPress blogs, which is how I have mine set up).

And with this, I’m once again putting out a call: Do you exist online outside of the Facebook walled garden? Give me your non-Facebook links (blog, Twitter, Tumblr, whatever) so I can keep up with you there!

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YATP (Yet Another Test Post): Facebook has apparently changed their API, so direct micro.blog > Facebook cross-posting isn’t working. This is to see if an IFTTT > Facebook applet still works (after the micro.blog > WordPress step).

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Test post. micro.blog cross posting to Facebook stopped working. Seeing if turning it off and on again does the trick. If this shows up on Facebook in a few minutes, I’m good.