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Throwback Post #1: Waxing Nostalgic on Blogs and Smartphones
As a few-times reporter in the bustling world of full-time journalism, I found solace and expression through my personal blogging. The keyboard was my faithful companion as I clickity-clacked out my thoughts, observations, and narratives. Back then, my blog was not merely an online diary; it was a sanctuary where I unwound the string of my day-to-day musings and expressed the long-form versions well before 240 character limited social media sites were a thing.
As a journalist, my professional life brimmed with structured stories where I plied my trade, each article meticulous in its pursuit of impartiality and substance. In stark contrast, I like blogging because it cultivates my of creativity, offering me a place where my voice dances freely without the restraints of newsroom protocols... Within restraint of course, coz' I didn't wanna get fired either! Usually my blogs were there to expand on something I wrote professionally and jump into the comments with my homies and chop it up about whatever. Or put a thought into the world to be expanded/pitched/seen/delt with later.
Well, life threw a curveball, and bam! Digital disaster struck. My precious data backups got hit by some unexpected corruption. (That, and I was hella lackadaisical with the 3/2/1 method to backing stuff up sometimes.) Those digital memories, once crystal clear and at my fingertips, just poofed into oblivion😵🌪️💔.
Yet, the universe works in mysterious ways. Occasionally, as if by serendipity, the fabric of the internet yields treasures from the past. An old post surfaces—a ghost from the bygone days of fervent blogging, offering a glimpse into my former self.
ThrowBack Posting to Rediscover the Past: The Journey of a Journalist and Blogger
Today I'm starting "Throwback Posts" as a category on this here blog thang. Each salvaged post is a time capsule, a fragment of the 'me' that once was, now presented anew on my current platform. Reposting these entries is also an act of preservation, solidifying my experiences and lessons learned for historical context and aides in digital garden cultivation.
Through these rediscovered writings, I invite you to embark on a retrospective journey with me. Let's check out some of my aged scrawlings, now ready to be appreciated once more—or criticized and mocked in a new age! 🤦🏾♂️
The Case For The Blackberry KeyOne
📆 Originally published May 09, 2017
Remember Blackberry? Some of y'all may have had one back in the day; the phone with a keyboard and all that. What if there was an up-to-today's-spec version though? What if instead of bastardizing their hardware with crappy software while trying to keep up with iOS and Android, they simply got down with the program and rolled onto Android?
Wonder no more. This is the Blackberry KeyOne. Here's a video to tell you about it better than I can right now...
Ok, but why would I want one of these things? Well for those keeping track at home, some of you know I have a OnePlus One that has a battery that can't make it through HALF A DAY now 'coz it's 3 years old. I also have a Samsung Galaxy S4 that's 4 years old. But it has a replaceable battery that's 6 months old... too bad its processor and 1gig of memory is OUTDATED and stutters on pretty much every app now.
Truth is, I was supposed to upgrade last year to The Next Big Thing, but... well we all know how that turned out...
And the upgrade from my OnePlus One to the Two to the Three wasn't impressive enough for me to try and "win the lottery for the right to buy" (although thank goodness OnePlus doesn't have that system anymore...
In the interim, I've had a bit of a revelation into how I actually am using my smartphone over the past year and it's really helped me see why a device such as the Blackberry KeyOne is a better fit for me.
More than anything else, I type A LOT on my devices. Whether I'm looking up an address here in Tokyo, using Telegram or FB Messenger to contact friends, respond to emails from work or drop some Reddit bombs here or there, I am usually poking around my keyboard...and I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT. I'm one of those folks who hates "typing" on glass. My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600. With a keyboard that had tic-tac keys. Then I got a Windows Mobile Treo 750. Then Apple ruined it for everyone with the iPhone and here we are 10 years later where every damn phone makes you swipe, slide, or poke the damn glass. I can't get used to it either; I type in two, sometimes three languages. Ain't no damn swipe-typing in Japanese! Just once I'd like to go back to the HTC TYTN days where I had a slide-out keyboard so I can Get Shit Done again.
2. I am doing more emergency sysop-ing on my smartphone. Damn you Android for being so open and flexible! Stupid Termux app and its ability to offer a miniscule chroot environment so I can SSH into stuff and fix errant config files and reset user passwords while I'm listening to Kendrick Lamar on the Keio Line in Tokyo rush hour and damn my clients who know I have that power! (But thank you for paying me for it!) Seriously, if you muck around the Linux server world like I do, then Termux is a lifesaver. Basically a small Ubuntu core distro, it turns your Android smartphone into a real toolkit. But you'll need special virtual keyboards to be able to do the stuff you're used to -- unless you already have <ALT><SUPER> and <CTRL> keys on yours... But the KeyOne's hardware keyboard can turn one of the <SHIFT> keys into a <CTRL> key. Then I can assign the volume rockers to do <ALT> and <SUPER> duties if needed. Job done.
3. I want just once to walk out the house without needing to remember to bring the damn portable battery pack. Again, eff you iPhone for starting the trend of non-and removable batteries. Special mention goes to Samsung for bucking the trend right up to the bitter end when vanity and flashiness usurped the functionality of being able to swap the battery out or better yet, getting one of those big-ass-double-wide battery packs. Back in my Treo days, I had 3 batteries for my phone, and I'd carry them in my pockets... regular trouser pockets... so when the thing was about to give up the ghost, I could power down, swap, power up and keep on truckin', all in about 2 minutes. Now I gotta carry around a battery pack, and a charger and USB cable... And OF COURSE my ol' ass phone does NOT have quick charge! Problem solved with the KeyOne though; it's Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor and 3505mAh battery pack has shown it can go 2 days with normal use. Plenty of time for me to Instagram my JapanLife all day then get back to HQ and my charger without missing a beat. A dead phone is as good as no phone here.
4. I even have to do all this stuff AT WORK too now. I currently work on a college campus that's blanketed in the warm, sweet embrace of free Wi-Fi connectivity (if you're a faculty or student!) and it's actually way easier for me to message my students, post on the class page, look up my notes and other stuff on the fly from the device in my pocket, rather than wait and do in on the PC in between sessions. I'd go so much quicker though if I had that keyboard though...and my battery wasn't at 15% already!
OK, so those are the major reasons for me thinking I'll go and grab this thing for now. $549 for a decent phone I'll keep for at least 2 years ain't a bad price to pay to be rid of some of my pet peeves of smartphone usage.
What's the difference between a blog and a social posting site?
This is gonna be a radical and controversial statement but in 2024, anything posted to the internet at-large, should be considered a “social post”. In fact, the same could be said for anything posted on the internet in 1994 too. Only the technology and methodology, and yes, nomenclature along with vernacular has changed. We don’t “upload to a site” or “update via FTP” so much anymore; we simply “post to the internet” or “tweet/tiktok/instagram” something. But the same effect is true once it leaves our thoughtstreams and becomes pixels/waveforms/electrons circuiting the internet: if the content is interesting to someone, it’s going to be interacted with _whether you realize it or not.
This may be the rub for a lot of folks, especially those in marginalized and vunerable groups-- how to be able to post something online without fear of harassment? How to put forth valuable (or just ancecdotal) content, opine, or just shoot the breeze without catching a flamestorm? I get it-- I’m a card-carrying African-American, and we constantly catch hell from certain factions whenever we bring up uncomfortable truths, both online and IRL. Being able to have a refuge where one can air out an incedient, write about something experienced, or just vent --without persecution-- should be an inalienable right! …right? I think so, but also I’m not sure the internet is that place, at least in the sense that protection in the form of someone not having a view counter to yours won’t get all stalky, bitchy and rageful about it won’t be there. There’s always the risk a “keyboard warrior” or worse will show up with that bullshit and start harrassing the OP and everyone else. Anytime you post anything even a gnat-booty-hair towards controversial, assume you’re gonna draw these people out, no matter how protected you think your space is.
https://unsplash.com/photos/man-in-black-and-white-crew-neck-t-shirt-g8yJjfQrOJA" style=“border-radius:10px”>Now of course you should expect someone to reply, repost, and click on all the icons to make your post go "brrrr" if you're on a social media site somewhere, but what happens when you've commented on a blog that happened to be tied to a social media network and your comment gets exposed to a wider audience? Some argue there's an expectation that one's comments in places like blogs, forums and other so-called "closed discussion sites" shouldn't show up in other places unexpectedly and there's a reasonable expectiation that "what's commented there, stays there."
Are Blog Comments considered Social Media?
My opinion has always been and will remain the exact 180º opposite: Anything you post online is liable to be propagated, remixed, rebroadcast, and otherwise indexed somewhere, and wherever that some_where_ may be, some_one_ may be talking about it if there’s enough interest. This includes the main post and any ancillary posts (comments) about it. The internet is a public square and while there may be buildings and paths branching off of it, I always assume whatever I say in one place (an instagram post for example) will wind up being discussed in other place (on twitter). This actually happens all the time, even from the social media silos like TikTok and Facebook. For example, I don’t have a Tiktok account, no have I ever felt the need to have one because almost all the content I’m interested in coming from there, winds up being reposted on Instagram or YouTube anyway.
What’s a blog in 2024?
This blog in particular is also an ActivityPub instance. Pretty much all the posts from here can also be tracked at by searching for and following @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.xyz in the client of your choice (which at the time of this writing, likely means a Mastodon instance, but there’s lots out there!) Local commenting is not allowed, but you can interact with the post from anyplace you see in the syndication line (denoted by the links after 📡🔀) It’s also a full-fledged #indieweb site with Webmention commenting as well; you can post on your own site and it will find its way here as well. (there’s a textbox on the page if you don’t have webmentions set up on your blog locally; just put a link to this post somewhere in your reply, then read the instructions there and I’ll handle the rest!
I try to PESO my posts and POSSE the resulting comments so what may appear as one article here is really the nexus of a cloud of similar posts elsewhere (for example Facebook, BlueSky and Micro.Blog) and their resulting discussions all filter back here, the “primary” article.
So.. Is a connected website the "future of blogging"?
…When was a website ever NOT connected? 😜
- UPDATE 20 JAN:
Added a link to Ryan's really good post that tangentially describes context collapse from an ethically thinking app development point of view.
Fifteen Years Of Wordpressing
Unfortunately my previous blogs are lost to the ether but they were all mostly powered by Wordpress. I might gather some of my backups and make some "backfill" posts and relive whatever moments I can find.
Until then, let’s celebrate this milestone and thank the contributors and community around this great open source project.
Doin' too much": 💥😖 Time for a micro/macro blog rethink?
At some point yesterday, my Wordpress instance (thus the place where the thing you’re reading right now came from) ran out of memory.
🤔 I suspect it’s because I’m asking it to do too much:
- Basic Blog stuff
- Webmention/Indieweb/Microformats stuff
- ActivityPub/Mastodon stuff
And all on a tiny underpowered VPS instance.
Now if I could have things my way, I’d really prefer a clean install of GoBlog like I had before but with an easier way to post photos, follow people thru RSS/#Fediverse, and connect to different networks in the same manner. Something like a Wordpress|Tumblr|Friendica mashup (basically smoosh Firefish and Hubzilla together…) I decided to go back to using Wordpress instead becaus
- My skillset for Go vs PHP is smaller. Go as a language is easier though so it's only a matter of time...
Since the above is true, I'm not sure how to keep it locked down and optimized; I've been dealing with Wordpress for like 20 years already so I understand this beast.
I only have time for one impossible project at a time:
- I'm also trying to wrangle my entire homelab environment into Nix
- In the beginning stage of building a new keyboard
- practicing a new keyboard layout...
Next, I’ll make sure the thing is optimized. This also means not only the instance but the underlying supporting software too. I’m pretty good at that part though since my day job also demands it. I’m running this thing on Caddy (told you I was gonna force some Golang into my life!) and a very lean MariaDB container. Don’t be surprised if I wind up making a Nix declaration for this set up and make it so I only need to back up one thing everyday to get back up and running instead of the three I need to do now.
I’ll continue to optimize things around here and make it work the way I want it. I’ll make sure to get a colophon page going really soon so I can let y’all know how I did it; I still think this is the best way to enjoy the best of all worlds in the #fediverse and within the world of #indieweb enabled blogospheres.
If anyone has experience with any of the above, reach out to me via this post or just in general at @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.net, @starrwulfe@micro.blog or @starrwulfe@vivaldi.net
¹: Kinda started this just now with this new template file that I’m slowly adding custom CSS to…