A first attempt at using WordPress for microblogging

Here is the brand spanking new Larry Sanger Microblog, which lives at a domain I had sitting around doing nothing: http://StartThis.org. As you’ll see, it looks a little like a social media feed. I simply downloaded a theme, then spent the day fixing it up so it looked more or less right like a microblog. I limit myself to 280 characters. That helps.

Microdog

You can comment in response, if you like. Try to keep your responses to 280 characters!

I am soon going to start working with a developer on a proper WordPress plugin for microposting. But this will probably take several weeks (so he says). Therefore, in the meantime, I thought I’d go ahead and just use WordPress like a social media site.

I am hosting the microblog on my own NAS, which means the microposts are being served right out of my office. Talk about owning your own data! And an especially cool thing, I guess, is that it works fine, it was not hard to install and configure (on Synology, anyway), and—if you can believe it—it’s not slow!


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Comments

Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

28 responses to “A first attempt at using WordPress for microblogging”

  1. […] World, meet the Larry Sanger Microblog, where I can be incredibly offensive and nobody can shut me up. They can ignore me, though! Explained at greater length on my macroblog. […]

    1. Sheila

      Awesome

    2. MJAlexander

      Arizona in the house… referred by Sheryl’s blog… see how that works!

  2. Matthew

    Delivered straight to my rss 🙂

      1. Cynthia Wineburgh

        Wonderful, best wishes – will keep watching your blogs for news! Decentralization does make accumulation of centralized power very difficult if not impossible – and that’s one of our worst problems now. (I’m a nobody, but I’m not stupid!)

  3. Okay I’m in, I just don’t quite understand what you’re describing. You are smarter or more technically savvy than the average bear.

  4. Martha

    Great!

  5. Kristina Krcil

    Interesting.

  6. Mutchler

    I’m here!

  7. It looks like you are doing something similar to my idea of blogging on a Raspberry Pi and I guess for similar reasons.

    I have to say I found wordpress to be annoying and so chose ghost as my blogging platform. But I see you seem to have got wordpress to behave well

  8. Maura Smith-Mitsky

    If you’re limiting your posts to 280 characters, you’re either protecting yourself from overwork, your verbosity, or protecting an aesthetic valuing brevity. Or maybe you’re just challenging yourself. Put some posts in Haiku format, maybe four poems per post. That would be a challenge, or…iambic pentameter!

    I don’t know why you’d want a plug in for 280 characters, maybe to count the letters for you?

  9. Gary Knight

    No fair Larry! You wrote over three comments’ worth of digital ink to get me to say something ;-} Why have a WP running to check prolixity, you ask? Because I can’t sum word-lengths in my head. Oh wait, there’s an idea .. show us a running tally in the comment box.

  10. JBS

    Cant wait for further development of this. I just heard about it on Timcast. IRL

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