Following a Link

Feeling a bit nostalgic for the old web, I posted this thought this morning:

How long has it been since you hopped around the web from blog to website to a different blog to someone’s about page to yet another website? I miss the old ways when it was a bit more work to travel the web, but more rewarding when you found some new corner you didn’t know existed.

I’ve followed a few different rabbit trails of links into communities and I thought it’d be interesting to post some of the trails here for future navigators of the world wide web. I’m not going to do a lot of explaining of what each thing is, that’s for you to discover if you want by clicking the links.

omg what is that app?

The first stop is a service I discovered years ago and didn’t pay much attention to because I didn’t get it, but then when Mastodon became a thing I started seeing a lot of folks posting about using omg.lol to hots their profile, domain, etc. omg.lol is built by Adam Newbold who also has a website,Neatnik, which he powers with a custom built CMS called Neato.

• Pagecord is a blogging CMS I found via my friend BinaryDigit who’s using it to power her blog. She also created The Paused Web(ring) for people taking a break from blogging.
• Status.lol is omg.lol’s status app for sharing short updates from your world. I saw Jedda’s status update referencing the grief from losing their dog, Cocoa, and clicked through to their blog post titled Ocean of Grief.

While looking up BinaryDigit’s website, I saw this post by Terry Godier, creator of a neat RSS reader app called Current, referencing a notes app called Recollect. I saw in the footer of Recollect’s website that they use a WordPress hosting platform I wasn’t familair with called Rocket.

Wait - what CMS is that?

Jedda has some pretty cool post types on their blog and I was curious what CMS they are using to power it all. Turns out it’s Bear Blog, which I wrote about back in December. There’s a category of posts called “Recent Reader Favorites” which led me to their post, On Making Friends as an Adult, which led me to seeing a comment from Keenan and remembering that they were on a journey to move across the ocean. I assume / hope they made it off the boat by now?

Shouting into the Atmosphere

In a whole different part of the web, there’s a bunch of other nerds who, like omg.lol and Mastadon, are also trying to figure out how to do social media in a way that’s different from Corporate Social Media. AT Protocol is the tech it’s built on. BlueSky is the easiest entry point into that world since it looks the most like Twitter, etc. but people are using AT Protocol to build their own apps that tie in to the social graph you and I are creating, in a way that lets the user (me and you) keep control of our data. Cool!

I had read about Leaflet.pub, a blogging app that I used to write a post called Other Apps to Use with Bluesky that Aren't the Social Network We Know as Bluesky, which led me to discovering Pckt.blog and creating this quick blog, Shouting Into the Atmosphere and a post where I compared Leaflet to Pckt. I still don’t know which one I’d pick if I had to? I’m leaning towards Pckt because Pckt has a feature called Notes that’s essentially a mini social network inside their blogging platform. That’s pretty cool. I don’t think I need yet another place to post online, but it’s pretty cool that there’s a whole community inside that app as a result. Which is able to post out to BlueSky as well? It gets confusing as to what’s where, and who’s connected how, and whether you’re following a blog or a person or both? I also don’t love that despite the data being yours inside AT Proto, you can’t just hook up a new blogging CMS to access data from a different CMS and keep blogging. Each service uses different post types, etc. so it’s not portable in that sense.

I also checked out Roomy, which is a service like Discord for creating online communites. If you have a BlueSky account, you can join the one I created to see what it’s like. So far it’s just me… shouting into the atmosphere all by myself. 😀

There’s also Grain, which is an Instagram like experience built on AT Proto. Like blogging, I don’t know if I need yet another place to post photos. But it’s cool that it exists.

Ooops I missed that sale

Along the way I remembered that I’d seen Baldur’s Gate 3 was on sale on Steam.

Like photo sharing and blogging, I don’t know if I need yet another adventure game that I won’t actually finish (coughs in Breath of the Wild’s direction on my shelf), but I’ve been really tempted multiple times to try out Baldur’s Gate 3.
Sadly it’s no longer on sale, so I’ll wait until the next sale to decide.

Which also reminded me that I’d been watching for Dune 2 to go on sale on AppleTV. I found a handy app called CheapCharts that notifies you when movies, tv, apps, etc. go on sale on the App Store. In a sneaky move, it looks like they upped the price of Dune from $9.99 to $14.99, but dropped the price of Dune 2 to $7.99 from $14.99. So the bundle for the two is now $22.98. But the lowest price ever for the bundle was $12.99.

Hmmm… more decisions.

Where should I go next on the world wide web?