I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from my website. I firmly believe that you should own your own content. I do use social media, but mostly as a way to direct people to my site (which should be the goal of everyone)! There’s always some value in different services like Pocket, email, Twitter/X, etc., especially audience and reach.
What do I want my site to be? A website does not just need to be for publishing information. Why can’t my website be the place I go for all of my own needs?
The current way that I follow blogs is through “subscribe using email” forms. This is usually offered if the site is WordPress and has Jetpack enabled, or some other service with a similar feature. But this requires the site to have that option. RSS is a long standing technology, but I haven’t found a reader that I like in some time. Lately I’ve been exploring a different way to subscribe to content using the Friends plugin by Alex Kirk.
The plugin allows you to follow content for other websites using RSS feeds, but also allows you to “connect” with the owners of those sites by indicating they are a friend or acquaintance. Once a connection is made, you can share private content with friends only and even mark certain blocks as only visible to friends.
All of your configured feeds are visible through a feed page with some filters and search functionality. It’s basically your own RSS reader with some extra features. I do wish this was styled a bit more. Looking briefly, it seems to use the index.html block template, but it definitely looks like an unstyled page. It would be nice if the content from each source could inherit the styles from the source site. Maybe that could be done with block.json?
Additionally, there’s the ability to send emoji reactions for a post. I really like this feature. Sometimes I don’t want to write a comment for a post, but I would like the author to know I read it and how I reacted to their content. This could be all the encouragement they need to continue blogging! Reactions are given from your feed page, and you can customize you’re reactions as well.
There is the option to also activate the ActivityPub plugin to create your own Mastodon instance through your WordPress site. I’m not interested in that just yet. I’d like to work on my subscriptions and connections first. Maybe some day in the future.
My comment section does come across really overwhelming. I currently have the standard comment form, the Webmention form, the WP.com like/reblog feature, and when people have reacted to content there’s a second “likes” section. I need to decide how I want to encourage interaction with my posts.
Do you use the Friends plugin? How have you customized your feeds page or content subscriptions? You can add yourself to my friends list here!
This blog is part 3 of my gift for Matt’s Mullenweg’s 40th birthday following his request that more people blog. If you missed them, here’s part 1 and part 2! I’m hoping to make 2024 the year that I finally start blogging more.
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