Tantek finally made me implement on this blog one of the core ideas behind IndieWeb, which is “Publish On Your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere“: instead of posting our writings to other people’s sites, we post it to our own site, from where it can propagate to other places like Twitter, Facebook and the like.
In the ideal form of POSSE, you never visit somebody else’s site to post something or do something other than read: you always do the action on your own site. This is a beautiful idea, because, for example, nobody can ever hold your content hostage; you have the master copy. If you ever wonder “where did I say X?”, the answer is always “right on my own site”. Master data management for individuals, it’s great. But there are some non-trivial consequences as I just found out.
My first plan was to simply follow the advice on the WordPress page on the IndieWebCamp site and find a suitable WordPress plugin that can automatically post whatever I just wrote on my site. Which is great.
Except that I also write a lot of things on Twitter which I would never post to my blog. Like a silly joke in response to something that somebody else said. If they all showed up on the front page of my blog, and in my RSS feed, people who like the hear what I have to say, but don’t care about everyday banter, would lose out. Two dozen pieces of chatter before there’s a long post that has any depth to it? No thank you, I unsubscribe.
So that wasn’t going to work. So I came up with something else:
I set up a second instance of WordPress on the same site. This one is at http://upon2020.com/banter/ and you are welcome to visit. It runs the WordPress P2 theme, which is WordPress’s attempt to look like Twitter. And I’ll be using it just like I would use Twitter. The banter goes there.
So. I think I’m doing POSSE: I do publish on my own site first, and then syndicate out. But I have two streams that go out, one for long posts, and one for banter. That is definitely non-standard as far as I can tell so far in the Indie Web Community.
I wonder whether anybody else has come across the same pattern or a need for it, and how they solved it.