I follow a number of blogs that either explicitly have a feed for “micro-posts” (like aliquote.org), or more generally have short-form, “off the dome”-style content in addition to their longer posts. I think there is something pretty empowering about that, especially when disconnected from social media, and as I discussed in my recent “A New Era for My Blog” post:
In line with my goals this year, I hope to remove some personal barriers to entry to writing, like:
- “Micro-blogging” – not every post needs to be a long, well-thought-out essay!
- “Drafts folder” – I have had several posts sitting in a “drafts” state for a long time. Some for over 1 year! It would be great to have a “drafts” tag on my blog for those posts.
- Ideas in Math/CS – “micro-papers”
In making progress towards that goal, I spent some time today modifying the code for freddy.us and my fork of jekyll-feed, and ultimately wrote a micro-blogging system for freddy.us. If you’re reading this post, those changes should now be live!
By default, the “micro-posts” are hidden, but can be found by clicking the “Show micros” link on the main Blog page (/blog/). This is to avoid spamming the main blog feed with these smaller posts.
In a similar spirit, there are two separate RSS feeds available (which you can find on the RSS “hub” page) depending on whether you want my “micro-posts” including in your RSS feed:
For now, I am relatively happy with these changes. I’m unsure how I want to approach exposing “drafts” in the future, but I’m hoping I won’t need to change the end-user semantics on my website to accommodate them.
I wrote a micropost after this. Can you find it?