I’ve moved to a new Tumblr account as the old one is being overtaken by “art” of a sort. So I’ve moved bluedepth.tumblr.com to another account and the old one, which is now named bluedepth-old will just fade out of use. If you want to follow my tumblr there, feel free.
The more I use the Drafts app for my iPad and iPhone the more I love it and the more I want to use it. It’s actually changed the workflow for my “Post-a-Day” WordPress blogging as well as my regular blogging in general. What I used to do was copy the Post-a-Day prompt emails over to my WordPress blog and set the post type to Drafts and let them sit there. I’ve never been a huge fan of the editor built-in to WordPress, but copying the emails to Drafts and storing them there, syncing them to Simperium which then synchronizes them across all my devices that have Drafts loaded on them, which is now just my iPhone.
The app itself has so many neat features, being able to store multiple drafts and have them swipe-accessible from the left makes switching files a breeze and then when the post is done and ready to be published I can swipe from the right and select as many services as I want to send my drafts off to. It’s the perfect promontory to launch Day One, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress. Generally speaking, the drafts themselves almost always follow a certain path, first to Day One then to WordPress because then WordPress sends links to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr on my behalf with the publicize feature. But sometimes I write things that don’t go to my blog, in that case I can send to Day One and Facebook. I have configured the apps representation in Facebook to conform to my “Sharing” security group, so even if I tap the Facebook option I don’t have to worry about my private sharing thoughts leaking out where they don’t belong.
The only thing (yes, there is one of these for every user) that I would really love is a Drafts app for Mac OSX. That would let me hack away on Drafts entries on my iMac without having to clear off workplace desktop space to set up my iPad. I think it’ll just be a matter of time before we see those options start to become available. I would pay $15 for an app like that without even batting an eye.
I ran into an inconvenience with the current way I share socially
online. I have established a new workflow. Short messages still end up
going to Twitter, and if I feel like they are worth sending to Facebook
I use “Selective Tweets” to push that single tweet forward into
Facebook. For longer entires I write them up in Day One no matter if
they are public or private and then save them there and then share them
via email if they are public with my WordPress blog. If they are private
matters, they simply get shared with Facebook with a default stringent
security setting so only the right people can see those posts.
The email routine actually has been hit and miss to start but now it’s
working out quite nicely. First I migrated my blog from WordPress.com to
Wordpress.org. This is just me moving stuff from a companies site (.com)
to the domain that I own with Scott (windchilde.com) and I figure since
I’m paying for it anyways I might as well use it. Plus the switch over
to the windchilde.com domain also allows me unlimited storage and
unlimited bandwidth so I can share photos and videos without having to
worry about running into any storage caps or having to pay for extra
storage when I’m already paying for a pretty good deal with the host
that runs windchilde.com. I originally started with WordPress.org and
figured that Jetpack, which is a feature crosstalk package between
Wordpress.com and WordPress.org, extending some of the things that I
liked about WordPress.com around my installation of WordPress.org for
free. One of those options was “Post by Email” which gave me a
gobbledegook address at post.wordpress.com. That feature never worked
for me. It was supposed to be turn-key but it fell on it’s face. So I
turned to plugins, which are how you can extend WordPress.org sites, but
not WordPress.com sites. The company keeps a tight lid on things like
that where the “DIY” system is far more flexible and accommodating. I
downloaded the plugin called “Postie” and configured it to use a POP
account that I created on the windchilde.com domain and got that all set
up. There were a wee bit of growing pains regarding how to set
Categories and Tags in the email posts that I was making out of Day One.
What I had was a rather clunky Evernote note with the copied text from
my WordPress Category page so I could refer to that to pick and choose
which category I wanted the email post to go into. This was a mess. I
thought about it for a while and when I was done working out at Anytime
Fitness it struck me in a eureka moment; Why not just use TextExpander
to do the heavy lifting? So I started TextExpander on my MBP at home and
it came up, loaded the settings from my Dropbox (neat) and I created a
new snippet, called it “Categories” and set it’s trigger to be “;cat”.
Then I loaded all my categories from WordPress into a bracketed
pull-down list that TextExpander enables you to make on-the-fly so once
I’m done with Day One editing, I can save the entry (also is stored in
my Dropbox, yay!) and then click Share, Email, and then with the open
email I can just type in the trigger for each category I want to add and
I don’t need to remember to go to Evernote to get the list, or risk a
typo screwing everything up. Using Categories this way is really
convenient and tags are a snap to add as well.
Every once in a while I like to plug software that really works for me.
I plug the tarnations out of Mac, of course, as it’s the platform that I
can actually get my work done on. The apps that run on the Mac make the
rest of it work oh-so-well. Day One is a magnificent personal journaling
app. It’s private and password protected on all my devices and stored on
my Dropbox so I don’t have to screw around with backups or restores or
worrying that my entire Journal may just flit off into nothingness if my
MBP or a flash drive decides to play dumb on me. Plus Day One has
in-built sharing features, so I can share via Email, Twitter, or
Facebook if I want to. WordPress.org is not really software that runs on
my Mac, but instead runs on a host. The host I use is iPage.com and they
do a competent job. Setting up a WordPress.org site is embarrassingly
easy, mostly just a handful of clicks and you get a starter email with
the address you should use and your username and a temporary password. I
started to use WordPress because I left LiveJournal when the Russians
bought SixApart, the company that runs LiveJournal. Not that I have
anything against russians, but I’m not a huge fan of my words in that
place, it’s a personal thing. WordPress.org also enables commenting and
stats collection and automatically publicizes on it’s own to Twitter and
Facebook and Tumblr so I don’t have to futz around and create links to
my blog posts after the fact – WordPress does it for me.
Day One stores everything, WordPress stores my public lengthy stories,
Facebook stores my private lengthy stories and Twitter and Facebook
handle the rest – the tiny stuff. It’s all held together by Dropbox,
TextExpander, Day One app, my host, WordPress.org, Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. It seems complicated and it is rather too-involved, but this
way I can write freely without having to concern myself with
self-censorship or exposing the wrong people to the wrong kind of
information. This way it’s all compact and interrelated and convenient.
So far, this is great for me and it’s how I am able to “have my cake and
eat it too”, which I’m a huge fan of in general.
All these products that I mentioned are either cheap or free. Nothing
cost me an arm or a leg, even the host, when you spread the cost over a
whole year is a pittance. I could even help friends and family set up
their own WordPress.org blogs on my host if they, and Scott, agreed. So,
if you think some of this would suit you and Scott’s good with it, just
let me know.
I really do wish that Plinky would re-organize their interface in a kind of whack-a-mole motif. They post questions to answers you blog about afterwards. It would be more convenient to be able to see a list of Plinky prompts you haven’t answered yet so you don’t accidentally answer a prompt twice or more. This is a general motif I wish more sites would adopt, especially the more social sites. Twitter would be nicer if you could mark stuff you’ve seen so you can see only the new things, same way with Facebook. Tumblr? It would be nice to have tracking tools for what you have seen, what you have saved, and what you have reblogged.
This sort of thing was answered well enough by Twitteriffic, back when I used Twitter a lot and I quite enjoyed their new-tweet-marker. I can only hope that other services help bring these features to the forefront for users to take advantage of. Only time will tell I suppose, if an idea like this will take off, or not.
The landscape of social media is a hall of mirrors. There are so many services that I’m on, and they all seem to conflict or collide with partial fits, all have different audiences, it’s terribly confusing. So far I’m registered with these providers:
So far I’m approaching these services as individual pockets of social engagement. I really need to decide what I am going to put on each of these services. The trouble comes when you find that all these services have in some limited ways cross-linking. It seems like a waste to share to each of these services but there is an in-built concern that if you close a service you are somehow cutting off real audience or potential audience. If a service is free, then why not use it?
There are some services that definitely are built for certain things. WordPress is great for really long-form blogging. Twitter is great for short-status-update messaging and link-sharing, Facebook has an odd blend of every service – using Notes for long-form blogging, using status updates for short-status-updates, plus all the picture and video hosting you could want which pretty much marks off the next two… Posterous and Tumblr. They kind of float in the nether-space outside of the previous three. Instagram is bound tightly with its iOS App, so it is social but only tangentially so and Ping.FM is more of a tool than an actual destination, so the tangent gets even further out.
WordPress publicizes to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook can be linked from WordPress and Twitter and Twitter itself? Anything can be linked to and from that service. In many ways it comes down (at least for the big three) a matter of audience. There are friends and family on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter, there are people on Twitter that aren’t on Facebook, but since WordPress publicizes to both platforms, it’s the equal opportunity platform.
I suppose my feeling of waste really comes down to Posterous and Tumblr. They seem like utter duplicates of each other. I can’t really say that placing content on either service adds any value, it’s just easy to crosslink them to all the others. Even when it comes to drop-in-one-place-spread-everywhere the two of them are almost identical. Each service champions what they provide, but even still, there is almost no information on why someone would choose Posterous over Tumblr, or Twitter for that matter, when you factor in all the “helper” sites such as TwitLonger, yFrog, and all of those.
There is a part of me that wants to crisscross Twitter and Facebook, but even there I’m conflicted. Not everyone on Facebook would appreciate the “nuclear follow cost” that my Twitter stream commands. I’ve kind of left Facebook to be a destination-dump for all the other services to send to. FourSquare sends to Facebook, WordPress sends to Facebook, as well as all the others except Twitter.
I think this entire segment needs to undergo a consolidation event, where a few winners are selected and their usefulness is clear to see and different from all the others. In the meantime, those that follow me have grown used to how I share information so I presume that maintaining the status quo will keep the boat afloat. I just wish there was a clear reason to select one over the other and resolve this tangle of odd duplication.