Into a simpler digital life. More focused on blogging and slower, more meaningful interactions.

I redirected my three different Mastodon accounts to my ActivityPub user in micro.blog. So the people that followed me in Mastodon are now following my micro.blog persona. I did not import the follows I had over there. I only want to keep my micro.blog follows and every new acquaintance will come organically from there. I deactivated my Twitter/X account. It’s not the first time, in the past I have always reactivated it because I didn’t want to loose the user handle, but that’s not very important any more, so we’ll see if Twitter/X is gone for good. After 16 years, 14 of them very intense. The friends I made there, I hope, will know how to reach me.

I’m keeping LinkedIn for now. It’s not very demanding and I always find value in the professional stuff that people share over there.

So the plan is to stick to my blogs for writing and NetNewsWire for reading. Interactions will come, hopefully, more and more via email. And if anybody reaches out to me in the micro.blog timeline, that’s a peaceful place, too. So all is good.

🚀 IndieWeb Carnival: Roundup – Manu

Jokes aside, tech is a blessing and a curse. Especially when it becomes unmanageable. And sometimes I think the only solution to tech problems is more tech. Which is silly but it’s a silly world the one we live in.

That is paradoxical, but quite true. Actually, that’s the route I’ve taken: instead of going analog, I built a this digital garden to make it a place of my own and find a bit of peace of mind. Tech to cure tech madness.

Anyhow, you should read the whole Carnival Roundup, it’s full of interesting insights into the experiences of a lot of different people. #thoughts

Hold tight.

#thoughts

#thoughts

I spent the afternoon playing with this blog’s concept and with iOS Shortcuts, improving, or at least trying too, my workflows to publish in this new project.

For the blog, I created a home page that is meant to be a representation of a garden made of different topics, themes, categories… It’s just an index page, and not a very fancy one at that, but that’s all I can build and I’m sure it will improve. I need to learn HTML and CSS and all that stuff. For now, I can tweak some simple code snippets I find in the internet or that I obtain from ChatGPT.

2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.

Following a “digital garden” concept, I built a home page with buttons that in my mind symbolize patches in a garden.

Each patch will have its contents, be it a static page, a blog, a collection or category of posts, whatever this personal site of mine develops into.

For now, there’s four patches ready to be visited and four more are empty, waiting for my future gardening. The ones you can visit gather my Thoughts, my posts about my Geek hobbies, some Art I want to share (mostly music) and the Photos I take.

So if you like my garden, you are more than welcome.

The keyboard is mightier than the pen.

I feel like I’m in front of a raw piece of wood, a big one, my task is to carve a sculpture out of that wood, and I’m just too tired to start the process. My mind tells me it will be worth it and the result will satisfy me and my client. But there’s a lot of work to do to start peeling off and shaping the wood before the figure starts to show. And I’m tired.

Bullshit, says another voice in my head. You’re just lazy.

I guess that the YouTube app draining the battery and shutting down the iPad is a clear sign that I need to stop procrastinating and start working on that damn report.

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

The source of this quote is Nancy Prager’s research as shown in this 2007 article, so kudos to her.

I found it thanks to this 2011 post by David Barnard that was quoted by John Gruber here. Thanks to all of them.

And as a bonus, I found this source for authoritative quotations, that’s going straight to my bookmarks.

The lighthouse and a few details I saw in the corner of Inpernupe today.

Difficult day at work, difficult week over all. But today I overcame my laziness and did go for a walk and shot some pictures. I’ll post them later. I got to feel like a hacker, too. And I made a potato omelette using a bag of chips, so I’ll never quit my main addiction, food. The day is ending with a smile, and that’s good.

I still don’t write for myself, I still do it for someone else, with the feedback of the crowd in my mind. I’m constantly thinking about how will my commentary be read by other people. Now I’m writing this only for me, to tell me that there’s nobody reading and that this is a journey of self-improvement that I’m choosing to walk alone.

I posted a couple of silly things and run to my Mastodon accounts to see if they had any feedback. The posts did not show up and it took me a minute to remember that I turned off cross-posting in both my blogs, precisely to prevent me from seeking the noise of social media. Old habits die hard, that’s for sure. My withdrawal syndrome is not that bad though and it still lets me make fun of myself.

Do I want to publish posts like this in my Estebantxo blog or do I want to keep this more personal and less obvious? I think it’s the latter. Since I want this page to be a live experiment and organically grow with its hits and misses, I won’t delete that post. But I’m going to take it to the umerez.eu blog and I will keep there the techy posts. Estebantxo, for now, is going to be a more personal place, like a journal of sorts.

Today has not been a good day regarding work. I stayed at home so it was supposed to be a productive day, yet it wasn’t. I have a big deadline tomorrow, and I behaved as I often do in this situations: I get blocked and procrastinate. I procrastinated the heck out of my email, so at least that’s quite clean, Inbox Zero goal achieved. But tomorrow it’s going to be a very early start if I want to meet my deadline and craft a report worth its name.

On the positive side, I discovered Jatan Mehta’s journal blog. This particular post on Embracing a simple but effective digital life or Digital detoxing is very thorough and interesting and it is in the line of Manuel Moreale’s post On POSSE, which I briefly commented here.

My RSS feeds in NetNewsWire are starting to look very good.

What I’m thinking now is that I might quit social media altogether and embrace just blogging to express myself, RSS to read nice people’s blog and email to communicate with them. I’ll see.

Oh, and I also recovered my DSLR camera. I need to move my fat ass and taking walks with the excuse of taking pictures might be the way.

The day started quite productively, meeting a deadline one day ahead. Then, around 10am, everything went to hell. I’ve been attending unscheduled phone and zoom calls for the rest of the day. So my Friday deadline is in panic mode. At least I could take a moment to write to Manuel Moreale, because this post On POSSE resonated with me and I wanted to tell him I liked it. In my Twitter time, even in the more recent Mastodon world, my response would have been a star or a like o a thumbs up, maybe a short emphatical shout-out. Mostly empty and ephemeral. I’m liking this new slow approach to my digital life. I think it can make way to more meaningful connections. For starters, it felt good to write a longer and warmer email to a blogger whose example inspires me every day. Not that Manu has any obligation to respond. It did feel good and that’s enough. Time will tell.

Good lawyers know that every question about the law has the same answer: it depends. Excellent lawyers know how to explain it to their clients. Artists get paid by the hour for explaining it very slowly. #legal #eng

I’m going to try the Cards Theme to see if it’s a good way to implement my idea of a static home page with cards or buttons for different sections. I really like Tiny Theme, but this early days are appropriate for experimentation. The other way is to learn a bit more of HTML and CSS, but there’s plenty of time to stop being lazy. Not today.

I want to find a way to use static pages to build my digital garden. I may use the blog format in some places, but there needs to be different sections, primarily static, and an Index home page that showcases and links to the those sections. First order of business, start thinking about the sections. Designing the site will come later.