Take Back Control of Your Online Posts
SOCIAL MEDIA USE is pretty much ubiquitous among Internet users. Twitter and Facebook dominate a lot of online traffic, and serve as primary portals to other content on the web. Social media services are convenient, because all of your contacts are likely
After years of poring through fake news and partisan vitriol on Facebook, I chose to opt out of the service for a while. Maybe it was the company I chose to keep. Maybe it was the fact that the 2016 presidential campaign, started in mid-2015, kept me on edge for 18 months. Whatever the reason, I felt my blood pressure rise with every login. So, I decided to turn my attention back to my own blog (which I’m paying for, anyway).
By running your own blog, you’re not as restricted by terms-of-use (short of hosting illegal content). Even if you do want to keep your Facebook account, running your own blog enables you to use the POSSE model—short for “publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere”—to disseminate your posts. By using this model, you retain control of a central repository for your content. (This is essentially the same model that every major media outlet— including PC Gamer Hardware—uses.)
When building your own blog, you need four things: a server, a DNS provider, a domain name, and software to run the blog. When you purchase a server (a VPS or space on a shared host), the DNS usually comes with the package. You can also run a blog from something as small as a Raspberry Pi at home, but you need a dynamic DNS service to make sure your domain keeps pointing at your home IP address, which can change over time. Domain names can come pretty cheap, if you’re willing to grab something outside of the typical .com domain. (Who wouldn’t want a .fish domain?)
That leaves you with the software. The good thing about running a blog is that most blogging software out there is open-source. WordPress is the clear leader in the world of CMSes, but it’s quite the behemoth to install and run.
Luckily, there are a lot more platforms to choose from. I’m personally running Ghost, which runs on Node.js, and uses Markdown for creating posts. I was recently introduced to Known ( https://withknown.com), which utilizes the POSSE paradigm at its core. Known is built in such a way that the software automatically re-publishes your content to the appropriate social media platform based on type (text, photo, audio).
If you’re looking for something lighter and faster, there’s a lot of work being done on flat-file CMSes. Flat-file CMSes eschew the use of databases (which just demand more security and administration) for flat files that contain the content. What I really like about using flat files is that you can publish with Git if you want (assuming you have a VPS or a shared host that supports Git). There’s a great list of flat-file CMSes on Ahad Bokhari’s flatfile-cms repo ( https://github.com/ ahadb/flat-file-cms) on GitHub (the repo is just one Markdown file). Since flat-file CMSes don’t require a database, they’re pretty easy to set up for testing, which makes it a lot easier to shop for the platform that will work best for you.
Whatever platform you choose, taking back control of your content can be liberating. After all, the most important thing to remember may be this: Love it or hate it, nobody’s forcing you to use Facebook.