Tech

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

Who is reading your Gmail?

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Gmail users, be aware: “Gmail has 1.4 billion email users. Every one of those users has agreed to terms of service that give third parties permission to read their email. And, of course that’s just what they do.”

Admittedly, this summary is slightly alarmist (but only slightly), as you do need to have given permission by signing up for an offer or service that performs this sort of activity. But that’s not exactly an unlikely scenario for many people.

Just one more reason why I’ve done my best to move away from Gmail whenever possible. While I still have a Gmail account, I moved to Apple’s mail services a few years back, and the Gmail account is little more than a spam and “I need to either unsubscribe or update my email settings” catcher at this point. I’d have nuked it entirely if I could figure out how to transfer my various Google accounts to a different email (which they don’t seem to be interested in letting you do, or at least telling you how to do so).

Yes, Apple’s another Big Company, and there are those who distrust them as well. But I trust Apple’s privacy stance much, much more than I do Google’s. It’s been a long time since I put much stock in Google’s late, lamented, “Don’t be evil” philosophy.

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This video is technologically fascinating, and sociologically terrifying. “It may sound basic, but how we move forward in an age of information is going to be the difference between whether we survive or we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

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Hey friends (and interested acquaintances)! Do you have a blog (or more than one)? Do you have an online presence outside of the Facebook/Twitter social media ecosystem? Tell me about it and where to find you! Help me rediscover the web outside of Facebook!

Another attempt at revitalizing my blogging

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For some time now, I’ve (mostly privately, sometimes “out loud” (which could mean either actually talking to people, or in online text ramblings)) been lamenting how rarely I’ve actually been posting to my blog. For the past years, various forms of social networking sites and applications — primarily Facebook and Twitter — have done a good job of monopolizing my online interactions.

It’s not all bad, really, as they’re great ways to keep in touch with friends, and I’m not making any sort of “quitting social media” declaration. But concentrating on those spaces has meant that this space, where I’ve been posting in one form or another for over two decades (seriously: my oldest “blog post” is dated December 29, 1995 and was posted back when I was still hand-coding; I have earlier posts entered into the blog, but they’re ports of old Usenet posts), hasn’t been getting much attention at all. And, as importantly, if not a bit more so, it means that virtually all of the writing and content creation I’ve done over these past years has been going to sites other than my own.

So going forward from here, I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make this blog the central, canonical repository of my online ramblings. I’ll still comment and get into discussions on Facebook and Twitter, but this is where all (well…most all…) content should appear first and will canonically reside, even as it’s mirrored elsewhere so that I’m not simply disappearing from those other spaces.

Here’s how I have things set up at the moment:

In brief (Twitter)

I’ve set up a micro.blog account, which is tied to both this blog and my Twitter accounts (I heard about micro.blog from a few places, including articles by Brent Simmons, Jean McDonald, and Charlie Sorrel). So now, when I have something quick and simple to say, it posts to my blog first as a post with no title, then picked up (via RSS) by micro.blog and piped to Twitter and Facebook.

Look here (links)

When I find interesting links, I’m posting them to my pinboard account — this is something I’ve been doing (off and on) for some time now, I’m just trying to be better about doing it consistently. If I want a saved link to post to Twitter or Facebook quickly, I give it either the .twitter or .fb tag respectively, which are picked up by IFTTT and piped to the correct site. Otherwise, the (apparently abandoned, but still quite functional) Postalicious WordPress plugin occasionally catches any recent links I’ve saved and creates a digest-style post for my blog.

Rambling on (blog posts)

If I have something more in-depth to say — like, oh, a few paragraphs on how I’m trying to start blogging regularly again, and brief explanations of the tools and services I’m using to start doing that — then those posts get written (in Markdown format, using Ulysses on either my Mac, iPhone, or iPad) and posted here. Not long after they show up here, micro.blog picks them up, creates a post that links back here, and then that goes to Twitter and Facebook.

It’s technically possible to just connect WordPress to Twitter and Facebook without using micro.blog as a middle step, but micro.blog is smarter about how it cross-posts than WordPress is alone. Without this step, every post would show up as a truncated excerpt and a link back to the blog; this way, that’s only the end result if a post is long enough to make that necessary, and shorter posts just appear to be “native” to whichever platform they’re seen on.

Will this system keep me going the way I hope it does? Only time will tell. But between Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy mess and Twitter looking more and more like it’s going to be killing third-party clients soon, I’m hoping I have enough motivation to actually keep this going, rather than falling back into the ease and convenience of staying inside Facebook or Twitter’s ecosystems.

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This is a brief test to make sure I didn’t just break things with my WordPress/micro.blog integration.

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I’d been considering it for a while, but comments are now disabled for my blog. Between my low post volume and the low signal to noise ratio, it just wasn’t worth it anymore. #f

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More testing: Posting to Eclecticism on WordPress using the micro.blog iOS app.