The micro mirror miracle. (Micro.hexdsl.com)

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

You can skip this entire article and just click here, if I’m totally honest. If you would like to know, slightly more, keep reading…

Micro.Blog has come up on my radar a lot over the last few years, mostly by being supported a supported publishing target by a bunch of writing software I have used. This includes Ulysses, Ia writer and a bunch of tools for content pushing. Micro.blog doesn’t do the best job at explaining its self, in part at least, because it’s flexible by design. What is turns out to be is a relatively low-fi content publishing platform with enough flexibility to work as your home-page, an actual micro blog, portfolio, booklog, or, in my case a low-fi mirror of an existing hi-fi WordPress site. It, I hope, gives my audience another option on how to interact with me and my writing, and while I am sure this is paranoid, it gives me an existing exit on the off chance that WordPress implodes. My WordPress site is self-hosted but given the recent WP related shenanigans, it seems logical to have an exit on the back burner, at least.

The thing I really liked about Micro.Blog, once I spent an hour figuring it out, is that it’s part publishing hub and part community, and I do mean community, rather than social network. The landing page facilitates organic and topic discovery of other people’s micro.blog instances, even the forum is filled with well-meaning people. It’s basically the smol-web I have been seeking but without the usual obsession about becoming insular.

The final thing I liked was the fact that it let me use my domain, so micro.hexdsl.com was easy to set up. If WordPress ever becomes a smoldering rock of smugness, I just have to set up a dirty redirect to hexdsl.com and poof! Business as usual.

In fact, I was so impressed with micro.blog that I jumped into the relatively small sub of $5 a month, in part to support the platform. This is exactly the sort of platform/service that we should be using and supporting because it has all the values we, and aging internet dwellers have been claiming to want since the invention of newsgroups.

If you are reading this on micro.blog, or on micro.hexdsl.com, you probably wasted your time… sorry about that.