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Own your work

josem.co

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Re: Own your work

#61

Post by isomorph »

pugets wrote: post #59
paxys wrote: post #25

The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…

In college, I did my calculus homework on blank printer paper using Sharpie markers. I could only fit one integral per page, maybe two if I was lucky, so I’d turn in these 15-page stapled assignments. It was calculus all the same, and I got great grades. I think the purpose of this comment is to reinforce that the medium doesn’t matter — if you focus on the content itself, you’ll progress.

Why did you do that?

Re: Own your work

#62

Post by 101008 »

CM30 wrote: post #3

The best solution is what the Indieweb folks called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site , Syndicate Elsewhere: https://indieweb.org/POSSE For instance, I might publish a clip on my own site first, then mirror it to places like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit so more people find it. Or post an article on my own site first, then repost it on Medium and Substack (with a canonical saying my own version is the original if possible…

Is there an automatic way to do this? Like a SaaS where I paste my article URL, chose where to replicate, and it does automatically? Bonus points if it gets them from a feed.

Re: Own your work

#63

Post by testcase_delta »

iamben wrote: post #39

Counterpoint - this is a bit like saying "sell the product from your own website, you'll get 100% of the sales and own the customer!" Totally true, but good luck getting the customer to your site. Way easier to put your product on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, wherever people are already shopping AS WELL - and take a hit on profit (at least initially) and figure out how you build off that. Leverage all the social media and blo…

I agree. I happen to sell the same things on my (pretty good!) Shopify store as well as on Amazon. Amazon outsells about 2000:1. The reason why is simple -- it's traffic. If you can get traffic on your own, say with a giant social following or TV presence, then owning your platform probably does make sense. Otherwise go to where your customers are. It's like the old retailers' saying: "Location, Location, Location."

Re: Own your work

#64

Post by javajosh »

It's clear enough who owns a speech, and like the OP I'm in favor of hosting your own speeches (and essays). But who owns a conversation? Does this rugged individualist approach to hosting one's own work end the possibility of online discussion? Or do we just hold our nose and do the hypocritical thing and host comments - encouraging others to NOT own their work?

Re: Own your work

#65

Post by the_gipsy »

javajosh wrote: post #64

It's clear enough who owns a speech, and like the OP I'm in favor of hosting your own speeches (and essays). But who owns a conversation? Does this rugged individualist approach to hosting one's own work end the possibility of online discussion? Or do we just hold our nose and do the hypocritical thing and host comments - encouraging others to NOT own their work?

Discussion is different from work. As you hint, there is no good way to co-own a discussion. Either you do it on neutral grounds and someone else owns it, or one party is the host and owner.

Re: Own your work

#66

Post by tete »

Instead of a Wordpress Blog or something I'd go for something static. There is a couple of software solutions out there from everything to blogs to website. This has the benefit that you can be a lot more independent. As long as you have some copy somewhere you are fine. You can back it up easily and so on. If you use WP (and MySQL) a lot more things can go wrong. If the MySQL server, your wordpress can get hacked for some silly plugin you thought you needed, the hoster of it or whatever are unavailable you might lose it, you might lose your domain which can break stuff, you might forget to pay, etc.

The idea here is something that allows you quick recreation and copying. You can just copy over static files. You can put it on your Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and even on your external hard disk or whatever backup solution you use.

Usually the main dynamic thing for writers is actually creating posts. So if that is some offline software that just spits out static files it becomes incredibly resilient.

One might think static site generators, like Hugo, but there is also GUI applications that essentially equal what the admin of a blog or CMS see.

Re: Own your work

#67

Post by lisp-pornstar »

breck wrote: post #40
paxys wrote: post #25

The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…

I must build static site compilers and markdown dialects so that my children may have liberty to write prose and poetry.

This, and also "The blog is about literate programming, and the content of the blog is the code that produce the blog"

Re: Own your work

#68

Post by yashap »

101008 wrote: post #62
CM30 wrote: post #3

The best solution is what the Indieweb folks called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site , Syndicate Elsewhere: https://indieweb.org/POSSE For instance, I might publish a clip on my own site first, then mirror it to places like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit so more people find it. Or post an article on my own site first, then repost it on Medium and Substack (with a canonical saying my own version is the original if possible…

Is there an automatic way to do this? Like a SaaS where I paste my article URL, chose where to replicate, and it does automatically? Bonus points if it gets them from a feed.

Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite make it pretty easy to cross-post content across many networks.

Re: Own your work

#69

Post by fsckboy »

lisp-pornstar wrote: post #67
breck wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must build static site compilers and markdown dialects so that my children may have liberty to write prose and poetry.

This, and also "The blog is about literate programming, and the content of the blog is the code that produce the blog"

my blog is literary criticism of literate programming, and so most of the content of my blog is also the code from your blog.

Re: Own your work

#70

Post by SrslyJosh »

> Imagine a billionaire buying one of the main social media services and some things not going as expected.

If you thought that Musk was going to be beneficial for Twitter in any way, you were deluding yourself about him. Tesla and SpaceX were only successful because competent people did all the thinking and spent a lot of time managing upwards.

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