Signal Lock

Thoughts, fragments, signals
The home of Colin Walker.
Written and sonic.

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Transmission

#

I hadn't looked at /reader (AKA /inbound) for a few days; I can't actually remember how long.

There was a lot in there so I hit mark all as read.

There was probably stuff in there I might want to have read, but if I hadn't actually sought it out I obviously didn't want to read it that much.

I didn't really need to take such drastic action, seeing as items older than a week automatically drop out after gradually fading. I suppose if I was that bothered, the reverse would make more sense: items becoming bolder to emphasise that I haven't read them.

Read 'em while you can, once they're gone they're gone!

No, the whole point is to not pressure myself into reading anything.

It may seem contrary to explicitly subscribe to blogs, to say "these are the people I want to hear from", then not read them, but I am giving myself the option. It is not a guarantee, it is a choice and not an obligation.

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Resonance

Anomaly

After another break, I've been wanting to come back to the blog but been struggling with what to write, what to say. It's all seemed a bit pointless but I know that writing is part of how I deal with things so I should get back on the horse.

I thought I'd trick myself into it by distracting myself with code. I initially considered repurposing my Sparks idea as a different way of approaching blogging, but why go through the hassle of building something new when I could just tweak what I already had.

With that in mind, I instead chose to simplify the current blog structure:

  • return to one post per day which is updated as the day progresses 1
  • scrap the live RSS feed and just use the daily feed to include each day once complete
  • scrap social integration

With no live feed, posts will not be fed to micro.blog in the same way. I have redirected the live feed to the daily feed but micro.blog was using a custom version of it, I may think on this further. Also, Bluesky cross-posting and the retrieval of replies has been removed. The code itself is not completely gone (and I have kept a version of the blog page pre-changes) but will not be triggered.

Having a single post per day goes back to my ideal blogging setup. I first started down that path at the end of 2020 but, obviously, this didn't last long after the move to my own CMS in Jan '21 - a shame in some ways. There is one downside to this, however, a single daily item means that comments can't be targeted to individual parts of the post, but I think the trade off is worth it if the whole thing gets me writing again.

# There will be more changes coming (simplifying the layout, CSS, etc.) so things might get a bit janky while I work on it all. I'm not sure what I can do or where I can take it within the confines of what's already there. To do something different maybe I would need to go down the route of reworking Sparks but that feels like avoiding the actual issue by just burying myself in code.

# Individual post sections are now linkable, so that's something restored from the first time round.

  1. This is how things used to be for a while on WordPress before I switched to (b)log-In ↩



- investigate anomaly