notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Permanence, Discoverability, and Control

I stumbled upon this post by quietbabylon, called “For Sufficiently Small Values of ‘Permanent’”, which I’ve chosen to sum up with these paragraphs:

Anil Dash’s post is about the importance of putting your clever/important ideas in a medium other than Twitter. Quick summary: There are a lot of good ideas in circulation on Twitter, but if you don’t put them somewhere like a blog, they are liable to be lost forever.

Blogs used to be the poster children of ephemera. It took the rise of even more ephemeral media (status updates and Twitter posts) for blogs to seem permanent. But blogs are no more permanent today than they were five or ten years ago. See also: dead Geocities, dying Delicious, and constantly ailing Tumblr.

What blogs and website have that Twitter lacks is rediscoverability. Twitter’s search is incomplete, missing what I’d think were basic things like searching a person’s timeline or limiting the scope to a list of accounts. On top of that, while the posts aren’t lost, we do lose the ability to search past 3,200 posts into the past—I needed Google to find that Dorsey tweet.

This is true, and far from unimportant, but there’s another thing that blogs tend to have that Twitter doesn’t: control.

If you own (although as the post notes, they’re strictly rented for a period from one to ten years) your own URL, and have a copy of your data, then you have a lot of control over your site. That’s most obviously true for a self-hosted Movable Type or Wordpress account, where you have the database and can edit the software yourself, but it’s also true even for Tumblr or Blogger. When Vox shut down, I lost control over the blech.vox.com domain, whereas if and when Tumblr closes, I can repoint the notes.husk.org cname to somewhere else, and (providing I can either replicate or redirect the /posts/id mapping) nobody will be able to notice the difference. (This isn’t just hypothetical, either: Tom Insam recently posted code that did just that.)

Discoverability is certainly important (and Tumblr’s archive pages are generally good for this), but a certain level of control is useful too.

Vocal Grumblr

Tumblr has a nice API (for reading anyway) that lets you get posts as JSON. Unfortunately, you can’t filter by tag, and per-tag pages don’t have RSS or Atom feeds of their own.

Vox has a nasty heavy Atom API for reading which doesn’t seem to do JSON, but it does filter by tag, and per-tag pages have feeds of their own.

Sigh.