Bringing It All Back Home 2014 Version

I happened on a post by Alex King this week and it reminded me of my ongoing desire to bring back most of what I do online to this site (or at least having it as the hub of my online content production):

I’m a big fan of owning your own online identity and owning your content. I believe that WordPress is a great tool for this, which is one of the reasons I’ve used it and supported it for the last decade. My personal site (alexking.org) is powered by WordPress, and it is my home on the web.

I blog there, I post photos and status updates, I have a list of my projects, and I point people there when they ask where they can find me or learn more about me. And I’ve been blogging there since 2002, so there is plenty of interesting stuff to find there.

However, my site is not an island. I have integrations with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (via Flickr), Pinboard, and GitHub. My site is my home, but I love interacting with my friends in these other communities.

The problem with “blogging” as it existed and exists today is that most folks interact with content via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc and it’s only the holdout nerds like me who still sing the joys of feed readers and RSS and federated content. I’ve gone back and forth over the last five or so years of searching for a solution to interacting with people on the social web while trying to keep most of my own content here.

I think Alex’s FavePersonal theme for WordPress might do the trick. It’s pretty straightforward to setup and includes some interesting dual flow between a blog and social networks like Twitter or Facebook.

I’m going to be experimenting with it in the coming days to see if this is the real solution.

I hope so!