I’m in bed, at home, convalescing it up after an operation. Since I’m not really able to sit or walk, I’m looking at old stuff, updating and whatnot.
The personal web page used to be a full service thing: the blog, the gallery, the CV, the contact form, the discussion forum. Now: not so much. In general, we are now disparately posting everything on a plethora of specialised social networks, for good and for bad. I mean, it’s an equal opportunity thing, not needing to have your own domain, the technical know-how, the problem of getting your thoughts out, but it is also a very fickle way of presenting your digital persona. Who knows what lies in the future: who will own your stuff, who will control your things, who will censor your thoughts?
I’m not saying this will happen, and I’m not going to go back to the way things were, certainly.
But.
All these tiny personal things everywhere should maybe be reposted somewhere central. Tied together. Saved for “posterity”.
I’m doing some of those things now, using a variety of tools, first and foremost the brilliant brilliant IFTTT, which I – among other things – use to repost all instagram images to my tumblr, tumblr.sunnerdahl.org. Even though it is a tumblr, it’s got my domain address. I’m also using it to trigger on a certain hash tag to repost select instagram images to this wordpress blog. Further, I use IFTTT to save all my posted images on both Facebook and Instagram to Dropbox. It’s also used for cross saving sundry snippets between Readability, Pocket and Evernote.
Though wordpress plugins, I’m cross linking Instagram pictures as well as flickr (which I rarely use these days) ones.
Through different mobile photo apps, such as Camera Plus and Hipstamatic, I cross post to a variety of social media and cloud based storage solutions.
I’m everywhere, but the stuff that I want private, remains private, outside of cloud storage and social media. One just needs to be somewhat vigilant about ones habits, and to be aware that once it’s out, it’s out.