This weekend has been nice. I haven’t really done much but I’ve had this feeling of actually enjoying things again. Being excited about things and having the energy to want to do them. It’s lovely. I hope I can make it stick.

One of the things I did was buy a couple of domain names. Wasn’t really intending on buying two but one was super cheap so who cares. Mainly I wanted to get myself a ‘proper’ domain name for my blog so I paid for the name for a year and set it up to point at my micro.blog blog and everything. I really like it. It does feel really cool to have it all personalised like that. I’m definitely getting into this all over again. So much better than shitty posting on Facebook or something where everything looks the same. It’s mine all mine, haha, and I like writing stuff and I also like just tinkering with it.

The other domain name I bought will probably just be used for email. It was surprisingly alright to set up with iCloud and now I have a pretty cool personal email address too!

I also changed how micro.blog and mastodon are set up together. I used to have it so that the RSS feed from my Mastodon account would go into my blog, so that I could post either on Mastodon or directly to the blog, and they’d both end up on the blog. I can’t quite remember why I thought that would be the best way to set it up? I think I liked the idea of everything ‘collecting’ on the blog. This did also give me the opportunity to put something on the blog that I didn’t really care to ‘share’ on Mastodon. I’m not sure why I thought that would matter?

I’ve redone it so that it’s the other way around now - anything I post on micro.blog now gets posted to Mastodon automatically. I think I prefer this because if I post something short on the blog, it looks very natural on Mastodon. If I post something longer, as long as I give it a title, it posts to Mastodon as a link to the blog, which is also very natural-looking I think. And then I’ve got the opportunity to post absolute shite to Mastodon, like the Wordle or something, and it can feel a bit more throwaway than having it added to the blog. It also means that Mastodon hashtags don’t float over to Micro.blog. I does mean that the stuff I’m putting on Mastodon doesn’t have any hashtags, but I can easily edit them in if I want to so even there I’m not really bothered. So I think I am going to prefer this setup better.

One more thing that I mucked around a tiny bit with this weekend is Drafts (the iOS app). I know I used this years ago but I only used the free version I think, and it was fairly limited and I suppose I didn’t really have much use for it. I read a couple of workflows for using it to post to blogs and I think I’ve got it the way I like it now? Plus I even think I can use it for some other stuff…

So it’s set up so that I can easily launch it from my iPad, from the lock screen of my phone, or from a complication on my watch. So I can get to a blank document really quickly. I downloaded an action that posts to micro.blog, it even gives me the option of publishing or posting it as a draft. I also got this other app that can be used to upload photos. I haven’t tested it out really yet but I think that will make adding photos to my blog quite straightforward. So yeah, I can quickly load that up and write as much or as little as I want and then send it straight to my blog, which of course then sends to Mastodon. I do also have an action to post just to Mastodon, if I want to do that for whatever reason.

I also just now set up an action to add stuff to my groceries list that I think I might end up liking a lot. I have had a Shortcut set up for this before but the problem there was if you didn’t hit send before your screen locked you would lose everything you wrote. And that won’t happen with Drafts. I think the next little tweak to do will be to set up some keyboard shortcuts to run these actions so that it’s really smooth to use from my iPad.

It’s been really lovely nerding out about all this stuff over the last few days.