Owning the microblog

I mentioned earlier this year that I really liked how Noah Read posted tweets and photos to his own site, calling them snippets. I’m borrowing that name and implementing something similar here. If you visit my home page, you’ll see these short posts already interspersed alongside regular, longer posts.

These new snippets don’t show up in the normal RSS feed. There’s a separate feed at /snippets.xml for them, and they get their own category for browsing on the web. I’ll also be cross-posting them to App.net.

Like the posts in Dave Winer’s new Radio3, these RSS items don’t have titles. They’ll be short like a tweet or App.net post: usually 100-200 characters.

This is the first step in a larger project that I’m working on — something fun that reminds me of the early days of blogging. But if nothing else, it’s nice to control my own content again. I should have kept all these microblog posts on my own domain years ago.

Manton Reece @manton