Early last year I wrote about how I don’t track you here, but others might. Third party sites whose content I re-use here by embedding them have the ability to track you to a certain extent. Earlier I already stopped using Slideshare and Scribd completely as a consequence, self-hosting my slide decks from now on.
For photos and videos the story is slightly different. Where it’s not essential that a video can be viewed inside my posting, I simply link to it with a screenshot, thus avoiding that YouTube or Vimeo tracks you on my page. In other cases I still embed the video.
For images I have been using Flickr since 2005. Back then uploading images to my hosting account quickly depleted the available storage space, and Flickr always was a good way to avoid that. I have and am a paying customer of Flickr, even through the years it was also available for free. Flickr is my online third place storage of images (now over 26k), as well as the place where I share those images for others to freely re-use (under Creative Commons licenses).
Embedding my Flickr photos here provides them with the opportunity to track views to the embedded images. The 2005 scarcity in storage space on my web host package is no longer a concern, whereas reducing readers’ exposure to tracking in whatever shape has become more important.
So from the start of the summer vacation I have stopped using Flickr embeds, and all images are and will be hosted on my webserver. The images do link to their counterparts on Flickr. In the case of my own images to point to re-usable versions of the photo, and the rest of my images. In the case of other people’s images I re-use to point to the source and its author. As before I will keep using Flickr to store and share photos.
Over the almost two decades of blogging I’ve embedded hundreds of images from Flickr, and I haven’t replaced those yet. Over time I will. It will become part of my daily routine of checking old postings made on the same day as today.
It makes ‘I don’t track you (but others here might)’ tilt some more towards ‘I don’t track you’ period.
Today at 14:07 it is exactly 19 years ago I published the first post on this blog. Back then I already mention how connecting to others, conversation, is the key thing I’m aiming for. I’ve always been a prolific note maker (going back to primary school even, buying my own notepads). With the launch of my weblog it became a more public thing as well as a means to engage with others.
In recent years I’ve marked the occasion by reflecting on my blogging and practices (see the 18, 17, 16 years edition), and long ago I marked the 3rd and 5th anniversary both extolling the value of the conversations and connections this blog helped create.
This year, as most of last year was spent working from home. It meant a similar internal oriented focus when it comes to my note making and blogging.
I haven’t spend time on IndieWeb community organising for instance, didn’t feel the energy for it either. I did make steps towards making this blog much less dependent on third parties:
I stopped embedding Flickr images in my blog, replacing them with locally hosted copies while linking to the original. Most postings now no longer have Flickr embeds, some 150 still do, which I am slowly bringing down to 0.
I removed all video embeds, replacing them with stills and links
I slowly replaced a number of Slideshare decks, but not all yet. There are no actual slideshare embeds active anymore on my blog, as I deleted my account, but the now non-functional embeds still ‘call’ those web adresses. I’m self-hosting my slides on tonz.nl (Dutch), and tonz.eu (English)
I experimented with sharable bookshelves for my blog, but there’s a connection missing with my internal note taking. I’d very much like to directly generate my book lists and book posts directly from my own notes. I haven’t actually posted about books here since January, a fact I dislike.
That brings me to the note making part. I have completely removed myself from Evernote, replacing it with a local collection of notes in markdown. I’ve kept them separate of the notes collection I actually work with, but import specific notes when I need them. I also, based on an example from fellow Obsidian user Wouter Groeneveld, started scanning my paper notebooks from over the years, creating indexes for them, and thus making them connect to my ongoing work and notes. My use of Obsidian to maintain those markdown notes continues undiminished. The speed of creating new conceptual nodes has slowed a lot, having mined most of my old blogposts for their content. I am now slowly evolving my ways of digesting and adding new knowledge and thoughts. In terms of volume, there are now some 5k notes, of which 1k6 are conceptual, 1k are ‘collected stuff’ with just a few added remarks of why I find them interesting, and some 2k5 work related notes.
In general I would like to see a more direct connection between my notes and my blogging, and ‘wiki’ pages on this site. I’m not sure yet what I’d like so I need to experiment. In the past months I have been contributing to two GitHub hosted sites using Respec, where the site is directly created from my notes. This works really well, but as those are public pages I do keep the corresponding notes in a different place than my ‘real’ notes. I do want to maintain the difference between public and private, as it influences my writing, but I do not necessarily want to keep the public notes in a separate location from the others.
Coincidentally, around note making, I did do some outreach and hosted two ‘Dutch language Obsidian user meet-ups‘. The third is due to take place in two weeks.
For the coming time this note-to-blog pipeline, and making it easier for myself to post, will be my area of attention I think. Let’s see next year around this time, when I hit the two decade mark with this blog, how that went.
How I took notes in 2006, on a locally hosted wiki