Basically for as long as I’ve been online, I’ve been posting pictures online, using services like Flickr, Instagram and Tumblr, but my posting habit has basically crashed in the last few years for various reasons1.
I’ve been missing a casual way of posting shots and sharing them on my website, so I’ve added a section to my website to support this. For now, I’ve called it Stories (not because there’s actual stories or anything, but that seems to be de facto the name for casual shots like this).
How it works
At the core of this is just a bunch of image and Markdown files (as any good website that wants to own your own content has), but for now this content is imported from in from my Pixelfed account. This is mostly because I can’t process and convert video files at the moment2.
Pixelfed is a great alternative in the meantime, offering a friendly community, a casual posting experience, and allowing federation with Mastodon, and this way, I still own the content if something ever happens to Pixelfed.
Not entirely story-like is the archive page. It didn’t seem right to automatically expire images like the social apps do. I could build this in at some point and for some images. For now, I say 🤷!
The future
- I’m likely to implement support for OpenStories soon as a way of allowing syndication. Just requires a bit more work on my part.
- Automatic updates. At the moment I need to rebuild my site when new posts are added, which isn’t that big of a deal, but I might add some type of client-side fetching for this.
/uses
I’m finding myself in a period of time where I’m making numerous tweaks to my website. I’ve also sneakily launched a /uses page, where I share the tools I use on a day-to-day basis.
- I used to post to Instagram a lot, but that has basically stopped in the last few years due to us moving countries, subsequently renovating a house, and of course the constant entshittification (for a lack of a better term) of social media as a whole.↩
It would be easy enough, but I first need to run some upgrades of Gatsby and NodeJS, and I don’t have much energy to deal with that potential can of worms at the moment. ↩