Two blogs, two languages
In my endless quest of “trying out new blogging things”, I lured myself into a new experiment for this weekend: What if I keep my existing (in english) Micro.blog site where it is at micro.juhaliikala.com, but also start a Finnish variation of the site on a separate domain at juhaliikala.fi. Would that fly? In other words; will I end up writing on both sites for a longer run, or is one or other going to get buried as a failed experiment? Guess we’ll just have to try and see!
Anyway, both now use Hyde theme (or a variation of it), the other one runs on top of Micro.blog and Hugo (actually, the micro.blog version uses my own custom theme), the other’s build on top of Eleventy. If you’re ever curious to try the same, micro.blog’s variation of Hyde can be found here and the eleventy version can be found here.
The idea is not to publish the exact same content in both English and Finnish. Rather, I’ll probably end up writing “independently” on both blogs, depending on the topic and the gut feeling of where this particular post belongs.
Either way, it’s way overdue for me to actually start blogging in my native language. Let’s just do it. No more analysis paralysis on that then! 😁
From the feed
Follow via RSS feed or on Fediverse @juha@juhaliikala.comBlogger for 30 years
I’m a bit late to the party (here on this blog), but I just want to take a moment to congratulate @dave for the incredible milestone of blogging non-stop for the past 30 years! There are very few (if any!) bloggers who have been doing this for as long as that. Even the Wayback Machine doesn’t have records of those first years (as it was started in 1996 and Dave’s blog has been around from ‘94!) @kottke.org and @zeldman.com might come close!
So, congratulations are certainly in order! Hat tip to you, sir! 🥳
Switched my new finnish blog from Eleventy (& Netlify) to micro.blog just now. Surprisingly painless switch! Synergy ftw! 😁
Aaand the finnish version is live now too! - juhaliikala.fi/kahden-bl… 😁
Got my custom micro.blog theme in good speed this weekend, aye! See it in action at https://blog.juhaliikala.com/ . Still ton of things to tweak, improve and implement, but eventually, the idea is to publish this as a micro.blog theme/plugin that others can use in their micro.blog blogs too 😊 Early feedback much appreciated! 🙏
So, as we now have three main ways for subscribing to a blog/publication; email newsletter, RSS and ActivityPub (handle), which will win? Some blogs even add a fourth way: Subscribing via WhatsApp / Telegram / Etc. Will RSS and ActivityPub subscribing continue being marginal use case and email still rules? I have no idea, but I think about this a lot.
I feel ActivityPub (especially in it’s current form) has a bit similar problem that RSS does, non-techical users just don’t use them for subscribing. It’s been all about newsletters for so long, that not sure if that mental model will change easily.
As a blogger, do you intend to support several different ways of subscribing (to your blog)? Or, do you plan to just promote one primary way of subscribing and maybe offer the other ways of subscribing in “the fine details”?
Excited to see what @john.onolan.org and team Ghost is cooking up here: activitypub.ghost.org. I find the new subscriber flow especially interesting (signup with email or ActivityPub handle). Some ideas here for future micro.blog additions too @manton? 😊
Aaand back to the “real human” type of profile picture again, after rockin the cartoon avatar for a while. In this age of AI generated pictures, having a “real human face” as the profile image feels nicer I guess 😄
New profile image, yo! 😄
Thanks @maique for pointing me in the right direction for finding Andy’s work! 🙏
Back from the holidays, more website tinkering ensues!
Right before heading to summer holidays in June, I launched a new version of this website.
During the holiday, I didn’t do much else than enjoy the vacation views & feels and post some stories and photos on Instagram from the trip. Didn’t even bring my laptop with me, holiday well spent!
Having said that, I feel excited to get back to tinkering with this blog again. Unlike social media channels where you have limited options on “making it yours”, on personal websites, the sky is the limit. It’s fun being able to make this thing whatever I want it to be.
Oh, where did we travel?
In addition to travels in Finland (where I’m from), we went to Northern Italy, near a city called Bolzano and from there, continued to Santorini, Greece. First mountain views with nice 20-25 Celsius weather, then full on sunshine, 30 Celsius and those beautiful Santorini views. It was great and I miss those places already!
Ok, but about that blog / website tinkering topic. Here’s what’s been happening.
Made some minor(ish) design tweaks to the blog today. New background from Santorini trip, of course! 😄 Also, dropped the newsletter subscribe option for now. I personally feel it doesn’t make much sense to send these (mostly) microblog type of posts via email (even if gathered in weekly emails). RSS feels like a better channel for those imho.
I wonder how others feel about this? Do you subscibe to email updates if the posts are mostly microblog type of posts?
Well it was fun while it lasted. As you may have heard, Meta has blocked EU users from accessing Threads. I noticed I wasn’t able to publish, comment or do pretty much anything else than browse the main feed in the app someday last week. No idea when the app will be usable for us EU mortals again.. :(
Thank you for the shiny stickers @manton! They arrived to mailbox while we were on our summer holiday trip. Just opened the envelope yesterday. 😊
Threads by Instagram is not available in Europe (at least for now)? At least I don’t see it in Finnish appstore. For someone who can try it, is it ActivityPub compatible? Can I use it with micro.blog somehow (follow people, respond to threads, etc.? 🤔
Curious if the Apple’s upcoming Journal app will turn our to be something that would make me keep a personal journal. Micro.blog is great for public journaling, but I’ve never really used an app for private journaling. Tbh, it’s been ages since I’ve had any kind of private journal. 😄
Papa's got a brand new blog
Well, I did it again. Started a new blog, that is.
Oh wait, that’s not entirely true. It ain’t new, as I’ve used it on and off for micro blogging. But I haven’t used it for longer posts like this one. Oh, and it has fresh coat of paint too!
The site runs on micro.blog, a blogging platform that also has elements of social networking built in. In addition to the micro.blog community itself, it also connects with Fediverse. And you can easily cross-publish to other social networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium and more.
It’s neat, do check it out.
Now that I’ve moved around some “furniture”, this place feels more like home. There are few things I’d like to mention about the “making of” this site.
