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Back from the holidays, more website tinkering ensues!

Right before heading to summer holidays in June, I launched a new version of this website.

During the holiday, I didn’t do much else than enjoy the vacation views & feels and post some stories and photos on Instagram from the trip. Didn’t even bring my laptop with me, holiday well spent!

Having said that, I feel excited to get back to tinkering with this blog again. Unlike social media channels where you have limited options on “making it yours”, on personal websites, the sky is the limit. It’s fun being able to make this thing whatever I want it to be.

Oh, where did we travel?

In addition to travels in Finland (where I’m from), we went to Northern Italy, near a city called Bolzano and from there, continued to Santorini, Greece. First mountain views with nice 20-25 Celsius weather, then full on sunshine, 30 Celsius and those beautiful Santorini views. It was great and I miss those places already!

Ok, but about that blog / website tinkering topic. Here’s what’s been happening.

Six photos collage from trip to Italy and Greece.
Northern Italy and Santorini, I miss you already!
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So, Elon want’s to transform Twitter into “everything app” X (handle all our shopping, banking, messaging, etc.), plant a microchip to our brains, build an AI that understands the universe and then.. when it all goes south, escape to space in a 🚀? 😅🤪

Made some minor(ish) design tweaks to the blog today. New background from Santorini trip, of course! 😄 Also, dropped the newsletter subscribe option for now. I personally feel it doesn’t make much sense to send these (mostly) microblog type of posts via email (even if gathered in weekly emails). RSS feels like a better channel for those imho.

I wonder how others feel about this? Do you subscibe to email updates if the posts are mostly microblog type of posts?

Well it was fun while it lasted. As you may have heard, Meta has blocked EU users from accessing Threads. I noticed I wasn’t able to publish, comment or do pretty much anything else than browse the main feed in the app someday last week. No idea when the app will be usable for us EU mortals again.. :(

Thank you for the shiny stickers @manton! They arrived to mailbox while we were on our summer holiday trip. Just opened the envelope yesterday. 😊

Threads by Instagram is not available in Europe (at least for now)? At least I don’t see it in Finnish appstore. For someone who can try it, is it ActivityPub compatible? Can I use it with micro.blog somehow (follow people, respond to threads, etc.? 🤔

Curious if the Apple’s upcoming Journal app will turn our to be something that would make me keep a personal journal. Micro.blog is great for public journaling, but I’ve never really used an app for private journaling. Tbh, it’s been ages since I’ve had any kind of private journal. 😄

Threads, by Instagram - Could that be the name of the Meta’s answer to Twitter? It might. I’m actually more than mildly excited about this. Especially if it really does have ActivityPub support built in. Instagram userbase suddenly available in Fediverse would be like a.. big bang..or something? 🫨

Papa's got a brand new blog

Well, I did it again. Started a new blog, that is.

Oh wait, that’s not entirely true. It ain’t new, as I’ve used it on and off for micro blogging. But I haven’t used it for longer posts like this one. Oh, and it has fresh coat of paint too!

The site runs on micro.blog, a blogging platform that also has elements of social networking built in. In addition to the micro.blog community itself, it also connects with Fediverse. And you can easily cross-publish to other social networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium and more.

It’s neat, do check it out.

Now that I’ve moved around some “furniture”, this place feels more like home. There are few things I’d like to mention about the “making of” this site.

A colourful sign with words You belong, surrounded by green plants.
This feels good. I think I should hang out here more. Picture by @timmossholder
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Third time’s the charm? 😄 To get better aligned with the whole Fediverse concept, I aliased my Mastodon account (@juhaliikala@me.dm) once more and will be using @juha@juhaliikala.com as my “main Fediverse home” from now until eternity (I hope!). So if you’re wondering why you’re suddenly following this handle, that’s why 😊

Also imported my following list to this instance, so all should be in sync now (or shortly, as the data still propagates).