Getting back into blogging

It has been a while since I have sat down and wrote a blog post that is not directly related to programming or self-hosting. If I look back to 2023 I used to write about all sorts of different topics.

I was reading the post 📦 Don't put yourself in a box the other day and I realised I have been doing something similar.

My website doesn't get that much traffic at around 8000 visitors a month, so it is not that I am feeling pressure for my posts to be meaningful, but I have stuck myself in a genre box.

Even though I label myself as a “software developer” it isn't my entire identity, and I am sure those reading my blog have other interests as well. I shouldn't worry about overwhelming my readers as not that many people subscribe directly to my everything RSS feed (I don't think).

Even if they do, having something interesting to read regardless of whether it is technical or not, is surely a positive thing. My newsletter generally has a limited topic scope any way which is where most people read my content.

So with that said, I am going to start blogging more and try to get more involved with the IndieWeb. I have been fed up with all the big tech platforms for a while so it is time to embrace the indie side.

This week I have set incoming and outgoing webmentions on my blog. There is still a bit of tweaking to get the flow working properly, but it is a start.

Thanks to the wonderful people on the Fediverse I was able to test out most of the functionality see Setting up webmentions.

The general flow is:

1. I have a webmention endpoint set up on my blog thanks to webmention.io.
2. I use Bridgy to get the likes, reposts and comments and send them to my webmention endpoint.
3. When I build my blog it pulls down any webmentions from the site and displays them on the relevant posts.
4. When I publish a new post I have a n8n workflow that reads my RSS feeds and publishes new posts on my Mastodon (GotoSocial) account.
5. I have another n8n workflow that sends out all the webmentions for links mentioned in the post.
6. I then have to manually add the Mastodon link to my post frontmatter so that I can link to it on my website (this is the part I need to improve). This is just to show people where to put a comment.

I will do another post in the near future with how all of this works. I also added the bubbles.town widget to the bottom of all my posts.

There are still some things I want to do.

• Fix the above manual link of the Mastodon post to my account.
• Backfill all the posts with an equivalent GotoSocial post.
• Set up Bluesky again (I previously deleted my account) to repost content.
• Get comments that appear on my PeerTube videos to show up on my blog under the relevant video.
• Implement the reply to logic, so I can directly reply to other indieweb posts.