Thinking out loud about website things

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Nikki Scarlet

When I first started working on a website for myself, my plan was to use WordPress’ functionality but to give it a theme I built myself. I wanted to go really old-school, yesterweb style with its appearance, while still embracing the flexibility of having a CMS / blogging software running in the background.

I started trying to build that site theme, but it languished for well over a year. I’m fairly competent with HTML and CSS, but once you throw PHP or anything else beyond that into the mix, I start getting confused. And given how few spoons I have these days, I just haven’t been particularly keen on trying to puzzle my way through skinning a WordPress site from scratch.

But the more the big social media platforms lurch towards collapse and/or destroy the mental health of everyone using them, the more I find myself still wanting that little space of my own on the internet where I can just . . . share whatever I like, in whatever format I like, in a space that I control. So I decided to just grab a super old, ridiculously basic but still attractive (to me at least) pre-made WordPress theme and restart from there. I’ll customize that as I go along, and over time maybe I’ll keep plugging away at the from-scratch theme on a test server or something until I have something ready to go live. A customized pre-made WordPress theme still gives me a lot more options for fun and self-expression than most social media sites.

And since now I have the beginnings of a website that doesn’t just look like a jumble of text, I’m feeling a lot more inclined to actually work on adding content to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to open it for public viewing soon.

One thing I’m hoping to get more into with the blog side of things, aside from just getting back into the habit of blogging more in general, is including little bits of microblogging here and there. I know my posts tend to run long, but I actually am capable of brevity, too! It’s just that I rarely felt comfortable enough on most other platforms to put my thoughts out there. It’s different on my website, though: it’s not a content mill, it’s just my cosy space on the internet, where likely most of the people reading and interacting will be people I’m already friends with (and anyone who isn’t friendly can be easily deleted and ignored.)

I want to get into sharing content I like from other sites via embed or screenshot, too. I tend to use the social media profiles I do still use as a kind of social bookmarking tool: mostly just reblogging interesting things from other people on that platform rather than creating content of my own. I’d like to still include that social sharing aspect on my website, in such a way that I can collect things from any other platform and gather them here.

I’m still trying to decide whether to use embeds or screencaps or a mix of both. Embeds are easier, more accessible, and make proper attribution a snap, but who even knows if anything I share from Twitter will still be there in 5 years’ time? Screencaps would serve as a more permanent archival tool, but they’re more work to capture, upload, make accessible to people with visual impairments, and link back to the original post/creator.

(I do also wonder how well embeds will work on Dreamwidth crossposts.)

I’ll probably start with embeds and see how well they work, and maybe try to make a habit of screencapping anything I embed as a “just in case” measure.

If I really do get super into the reposting/content sharing from other platforms, I’ll likely refrain from crossposting everything to Dreamwidth just to avoid spamming my mutuals.

New Year, New Try

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Nikki Scarlet

I keep saying I’m going to be more active with proper blogging/journaling, but then I toddle off to Discord and forget for months at a time because that’s where all the fandom fun is.

Things are good, though! Mostly. At the moment I’m a little under the weather, but otherwise there are good things happening!

My mental health is slowly improving. I haven’t felt depressed in a long time, but the anxiety is still a challenge, and the medication is still leaving me pretty knocked out most of the time. My physical health in general has sort of deteriorated a bit while I’ve been working out the medication side of things, but I think that will start to improve once I’ve found the right combination/dosage and then acclimated to that.
I have a new work-from-home job, as of this month. I’m not making anywhere near as much at this job as at my last one (it’s roughly the same amount of money per hour, but it’s less hours), but I’ll be making enough for now, and I am more than happy with that. Especially since it’s with a not-for-profit that provides a service I strongly support. I feel like I’m contributing to something really good, on top of paying my bills.
For years — probably over a decade — I could barely manage to finish reading a single book in a year, but in the last five months or so I’ve finished twelve and am working on three more. The voracious reader of my childhood has returned.

Lately I’m really into classic lit. It all started with Dracula Daily last year (which will be starting again this year, if anyone wants to hop on board), and then I found the Serial Reader app and it’s allowed me to keep the Dracula Daily experience going with stories like Around The World In Eighty Days, The Great Gatsby, P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves series, A Christmas Carol, and so on. I also bought the full/premium version of the app (it’s a one-time payment of $3 USD) so I could load my own ebooks into it, read ahead when I feel like it, and enjoy some other perks.

I’ve also read a few more recent books that I’d been meaning to get around to finishing. Some of them just so I could decide whether to keep them or not. A few of those ended up surprising me — I won’t say they were good books, but I enjoyed them and decided I wanted to keep them as Trashy Comfort Reads™. Another one, though, is going to be shredded. Partly because it was just really badly written and stupid, partly because I found out one of the authors (a musician I used to follow) is someone I no longer wish to support, and partly because some water got spilled on it and it dried all wrinkly and stiff, so it probably wouldn’t get bought up if I donated it anyway. I’m not normally in favour of destroying books, but this one honestly would serve the world better if it was recycled into something new.
I’m making slow-but-steady progress on a lot of personal/domestic/hobby goals, as well. Figuring out a method for organising my life and tracking my progress that actually works for me has really been helping. For a while, my friend Lennora and I were really getting sucked in to paper planners, but I never really ended up using them. I still have them, they’re very pretty, but I couldn’t get myself into the habit of using them. What does seem to work for me, though, is a digital planner. I’m using Notion as mine. It’s super customisable and gives me a way to easily visually organise my scattered brain just by throwing down a bunch of concepts and slowly segmenting them into various categories and databases as I go along. And it’s cloud-based, so I can use it across all my devices. Ideally I’d like a more or less identical app that I could self-host, or at least something with a little more of a privacy focus, but for the moment this really does do everything I need it to do.
In general, making a project of getting away from corporate social media / internet and trying to make my internet use a lot more like it was back in the 90s and 2000s has been really fulfilling and helpful to my mental health. The only “big” social media I still do binge sessions on is Tumblr, and I’ve been dipping in and out of Mastodon lately as well. I really like the idea behind federated social media and I hope it takes off, although I feel like Mastodon (and other services it’s currently federating with) is more of a prototype / proof-of-concept than the actual Next Big Thing. But as Denise goes over on this post, I really think we’re going to need to push for some big legal changes before social media can truly be what we want it to be.

In the meantime, though, there are small Discords for sharing fun fandom things with smaller groups of friends and fellow fen. At least until Discord gives in to greed and sends us scrambling for the next alternative chat program. Discord’s about as close to old-school IRC as I’m going to be able to get with my current social spheres, so I’m happy with that for now.

Outside of that, though, I’ve been relying a lot more on RSS for things I want to follow. I have two different RSS reading systems that work for me: for anything I want to see every post of (particular tumblr users, webcomics, my friends’ twitter feeds thanks to a workaround that still appears to be working), I have those feeds set up in my Thunderbird client so I can read a daily digest of the things I really want to keep up with alongside my email. For other things I mostly just want to be able to dip into here and there at my leisure based on subject/headlines (blogs, news feeds, etc), I have the livemarks add-on installed on Firefox.

(You should be using Firefox, too. :P)

I also no longer use Spotify — I’ve gone back to just buying music and listening to my MP3s. When and where I can, I buy full albums on CD and rip them to my computer. For music discovery, I use YouTube or Bandcamp (the latter also being one of my main sources for buying music). Same thing with streaming television and film: wherever possible, I just buy DVDs or Blu Rays. If something is only available on a streaming service, I can usually just visit a friend who has that service and watch it with them. (Or I can find . . . other alternative solutions.)

For audiobooks I have shunned Audible in favour of libro.fm, which gives you DRM-free versions of the audiobook you want while helping to support independent bookstores. I would be doing the same for print books via bookshop.org, but Bookshop isn’t available for my country yet, so I usually go with either eBay or a local retailer. Essentially, I’ll take any opportunity to divert money away from Amazon and its subsidiaries. I’m not fully boycotting Amazon because sometimes it’s literally the only place you can get a thing you need, but it’s become very, very rare for me to buy anything from them. Once or twice a year, maybe.

Google’s also been largely snubbed by me. I use Sync.com for cloud storage and either Notion or Cryptpad for cloud-based document creation, depending on my needs. I have my own server host and domain for email (and multiple email addresses for multiple purposes, which makes organizing my email so much easier). I use Qwant for most of my search engine needs. YouTube’s about the only Google product I still regularly use in my personal life. For work it’s a different story, though: I do use Google products for work, because that’s what everyone’s using.

Any opportunity I can take to thumb my nose at corporate greed in general in favour of giving money to people who are just trying to keep the lights on (including/especially artists), and/or people who are actively trying to make life and the internet better, I take it. And it’s made my own life a lot happier.

So, that’s how things are going, on the broad scale! I have a more recent “little bits of happy from the past couple of weeks” sort of list as well, but I’ll save that for my next post.