CURRENT PROGRESS:
Facebook:
(I’m up to Sep 13, 2014, 8:10 PM)Twitter:
Livejournal:
WP Blog:
(Imported, tags/categories cleared, post review pending)WP Politics:
(Completed. Tag = TLDR Politics)So you might have noticed, I moved the Dumptruck blog to the top-level of my oldest-owned domain Zerosubspace. It’s also running on a t3a.nano instance on Amazon AWS EC2.
Why?
Well, you probably didn’t say why, but I am going to tell you anyway since you committed to reading this. Though you can stop, if you’d like.
I’ve had a longstanding project in the background for the better part of the last decade to coalesce my entire online blog, social media, and written works repositories into one location. The secondary goal was also to offload a lot of niche topics and controversial things into their own containment zones. But I could not really determine how I wanted to structure it, and I wasn’t completely settled on WordPress as the CMS of choice. But finding it difficult to really work with anything else, often requiring some heavy lifting and import/export compatibility issues, I came back to WordPress because it’s just easier for me to use, and I don’t need anything fancy theme-wise. I prefer the minimalist approach much like my blogs and journals of yore.
I like to write, and I like to write a lot of exposition and opinion pieces. Ten years ago, people largely read the things they wrote online. Livejournal was an early social media concept still anchored in The Old Ways of unwarranted self-importance. But when I began Facebook, ironically this week ten years ago, I tried to import a lot of those ways into Facebook. As time wore on, it became obvious that Facebook is not for that purpose. People log into Facebook, scroll endlessly through ads, sponsored content, news articles about tragedy that they skip over to as not to feel bad during a “good day”, and pictures of animals, food, babies, and everything else. So I operated a number of side-blogs elsewhere. But they don’t get the kind of traffic or response I’d expect, so I kept trying to fold things back into Facebook and Twitter. In the grand scheme of things, that did not work. As people became more and more ensconced in their own bubbles and safe spaces, myself included, I found there was no longer a place on social media for the kind of useless prattling I offer.
So ultimately I decided that even though this blog will get little traffic (partly thanks to ROBOTS.TXT) and little notice, I want to construct both an archive of what was, and continue writing what will be. I’ll probably set up a plugin to cross-post to Facebook, but when I return to Facebook, the goal moving forward is just going to be posting shortform takes and life updates. Nothing else. The ultimate end goal is to decouple myself from the insidious nature of Facebook and Twitter, and control more of my own data. I haven’t decided if I’ll ever delete everything, because my life likes to tag me in posts and photos and have my presence around her social media orbit.
I preserved ninety posts from the Dumptruck blog under the category “Originals” which will cover any and all original blog works. The categories “Facebook”, “Twitter”, and “Livejournal” will cover curated posts from those three social media platforms as I bring them over. It will be a long process as there is no neat way to import these, I tried. Finally, there is a catagory called “Classics” which will feature some posts from deprecated blogs, such as “TLDR Politics”, “TLDR Vidya”, and the original blog.zerosubspace.com. I do not know if I will try to import material from the old Blogspot blog I had during high school. A lot of it was pretty brutal as I had a lot of shit happen back then. A lot of my early web is gone, and often I kind of like it that way.
As for a technical rundown, my current VPS host ChicagoVPS is good, but I don’t really utilize it fully for much anymore. I did revive the anime blog, which I am debating if I will keep there, or also move. What I am testing is nano instances on Amazon EC2 to see if they will be good handling small-traffic blogs. It’s a two-core 512MB instance that should cost less than $5 a month, and since I use R53 for DNS, it doesn’t have to go far outside their infrastructure. The anime blog may stay on ChicagoVPS because in previous experience the traffic it was getting required more resources. But I also wanted to separate everything out as I had too many domains going to one place. As for my difficulties with trying to import data into WordPress, sadly I lack the in-depth knowledge to really work with it to where I could have probably gotten these to work. So I tried many boxed solutions but ran into a ton of issues trying to work with Facebook’s Developers portal and API. They do offer the option now to download your data both in HTML and JSON, but I could not find a JSON plugin that would do what I wanted to do.
So I am just going to do it the old fashioned way. It’s going to take awhile, but it also allows me to go through 10-15 years of bullshit and pick out stuff worth carrying over. I am also going to delete what I bring over. I don’t think there will be too many issues, as it will be mostly the dumb political shit or such. I’ll judge if its impact is worth keeping or not.
Questions? Comments? Leave em here or hit me up on Discord @ Equilateral#6206