Tag: site-news

Now With a Like Button

I’ve been considering adding a simple like button for awhile now – just to give a people a way to say they enjoyed a post without needing to go to the trouble of typing out a full comment. I didn’t want to use the official WordPress one because it ties being able to like things into having an official WordPress account (which most random visitors won’t have) and also means your activity is likely being logged to them as well (I’ve avoided Jetpack for similar reasons, I’d like to avoid having external trackers on here where I can).

I ended up settling on WP Ulike, a like plugin that claims GDPR compliance by minimizing what it logs and as far as I’ve been able to determine, isn’t sending any data anywhere but a dashboard in my admin console. Some parts of it do feel like I’m not the original audience (the dashboard has a lot of ‘optimize your content’ messaging, clearly aimed more at businesses), but it does look like it does what I need.

You should see a like button at the bottom of posts now. Much like the Mastodon like button all it does is tell me you liked my post. No algorithm or advertiser should be getting any data from that, but I’ll feel happier knowing you enjoyed it.

No Longer Alone in a Tiny Pod

Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod1. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.

Recently the Australian Posters Union decided to offer WordPress hosting to donating members. Since I already donate to them it made perfect sense for me to take them up on the offer.

The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.

Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.

Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.

  1. Pikapods lets you run preconfigured pods for a variety of web based apps. They’re fairly easy to set up if you’ve got basic technical skills and the supported options include WordPress and Ghost. ↩︎

A Blog is born

I’m still setting this site up, and I’ll have to come up with a better name, but it exists. It is here.

I’ll be using it to share the miniatures and tabletop stuff I find myself working on. I’ll probably continue to post WIP shots to Pixelfed, and to do more long-form write-ups here.

If you’re interested in hearing more, go ahead and add me to your RSS reader of choice. If you don’t have an RSS reader of choice, consider adopting one for the sake of the indieweb.