I was super happy to find Piwigo among the available applications to install on my self hosted site managed at Infomaniak. Having already set up my blog through the same process and migrated everything from wordpress.com, I was finally going to have text and pictures in one place!
But that proved to be too complex for me or not designed well enough or perhaps bugged to the core. Sigh.
I found a workflow that although wonky did more or less work. I activated a plugin to place pictures on a map based on gps metadata. Except that Piwigo ignores or can’t read them and having to drop each picture on a map is tedious at best, or inaccurate. Grrr.
I lack the expertise to follow my geek friends’s ways and even those who documented thoroughly how they did their setup proved too complicated for me.
For a while I thought of hiring a freelance web developer to set me up but I don’t think I would understand or like the workflow. I may still ask one day!
Mostly I feel bad twice. Once because the state of the web leaves a lot to be desired, and then because it makes me realize I am dumb and I don’t like that feeling of course 🤷🏻
Flickr is really neat. I’m keeping my subscription and never mind for now that my pictures can’t be at the koalie.net domain.
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.
Concept of ‘shifting baselines’ which is useful in many other contexts when considering ‘change’:
As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.
Rewilding vs. timid incremental fixes that afford no true progress:
But rewilding a built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.
Deep defects run deep:
Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.
Public utilities need to be recognized as such, and funded as such (including the non-profit organization I work for, W3C, which develops standards for one application of the Internet: the Web):
[Instead, w]We need more publicly funded tech research with publicly released findings. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility that we must regain control of.
Better ways of doing it (also, read as a pair with the concluding paragraph of the article which I labeled ‘manifesto’):
The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.
Principled robust infrastructure:
We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance.
Manifesto (which I read several times and understood more of each time):
Ecologists have reoriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.
I am looking forward to a piece (or a collection of pieces) that will talk to the people in a manner that they hear this [understand it] and that moves them to make different choices.
Pretty much as I am doggedly and single-mindedly making different and sensible ecological choices for the planet, while I look forward to people being moved at last to durably do the same.
My thanks to Robin (who I know and work with) and to Maria (who I’d like to know now)!
This blog was hosted on wordpress.com in 2013-2023, and displayed at koalie.blog since 2018. This setup expires –and will close– in July 2024.
These are my notes for future me and whoever may be curious.
Blogging software
I’ve been blogging offline since 2005 (I used a local instance of Blosxom as a diary which I kept for myself via a terminal on my laptop) and online since 2006 (on my friend Amy’s blog Dullicious where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years, and on My Opera). My previous migration in 2013 moved my blog from My Opera (which Opera shut down four months after) to wordpress.com.
All this time my website koalie.net was hosted for free on a shared server in one of the machine rooms at MIT and I could not easily get any blogging software installed, so my blog had to be separate from my website.
But last year’s infamous Gandi dick move was both a curse and a blessing. Ditto an internal decision at work that free hosting for personal websites was ending by year end as a result of W3C moving out of MIT in January 2023.
Domain name, email, Web hosting
In June 2023, Gandi announced that the free e-mail service included with domain name rental was becoming a paying subscription by year end, as well as a general increase of their prices the following month. For email, I was using 2 boxes (for me and my son), so that meant paying an extra € 115/year. So I resolved to get email elsewhere and set up a redirect on Gandi mail. For domain name rental, I had renewed it for 5 years in January 2022, so I’m all set until February 2027.
I chose to register in July a free email account at Infomaniak (more than one in fact –for me, my son, my dad), and then the day after Christmas subscribed separately for € 82,80/year the Infomaniak Web Bundle hosting plan that offers 250 GB storage, for up to 20 sites, and the ability to install and manage over 100 web applications and CMS. I’m sharing that space with a colleague of mine. In February 2027, I’ll rent the koalie.net domain name with them too.
I activated ssh and was able in minutes via rsync to move my website content from the external hard drive it lives on, onto the web hosting.
I figured I now could at last unite my blog and my website! My wordpress.com subscription for the Starter Plan costs € 42/year and the koalie.blog domain name rental costs € 22/year, so a total of € 64/year (since I signed up for it in 2018, it has cost me € 320+)
So I painlessly installed the WordPress web app on my Infomaniak space.
Exporting from wordpress.com
I was able to export a lot of my wordpress.com data (a 6.3 MB XML file once unzipped) and import it in the self-hosted WordPress app I installed on Infomaniak as a sub-domain of koalie.net: 495 blog posts and 150+ comments.
That’s not everything, though. I was dismayed that the media items aren’t part of the export. They remain hosted on wordpress.com and the blog posts that reference them continue to link to the files on wordpress.com. Similarly, themes settings and blog settings aren’t exported. Finally, all links in blog posts and pages are absolute. In my case, I had a mix of links to coraliemercier.wordpress.com (2005-2018) and koalie.blog (2018-2023).
Importing and fixing my blog
I exported my wordpress.com media items (3.06 GB for about 1300 files sorted by year and month). Then I spent many mind-numbing hours (over 80h) uploading them post by post.
In addition to adding back the media files, I wanted to write the alternative texts (wordpress.com is very bad at nudging bloggers to write any alt text and even if you think of it, the blogging workflow makes it difficult, I found), to check and fix the links (so now most if not all of my blog links start with / and don’t include the domain name), and remove all of the posts that included media from the Instagram account I deleted many years ago.
At the moment I’m using the same theme I was using in wordpress.com: Twenty Fifteen. For the theme settings and the blog settings, I put two windows side by side and compared the pages to click through the options and fiddle to replicate what I had. There are a few differences but nothing that bothers me.
It’s costly to leave wordpress.com
I used my Christmas vacation to make a dent in the massive undertaking of re-uploading my media files and then checking each post for quality assurance. That’s the first intangible cost: time.
The second cost is intangible as well: the loss of the wordpress.com network effect (ability to find new blogs from fellow wordpress.com users, and for them to find and “follow” min), and of wordpress.com’s SEO (which only can explain that my blog had consistent hits every day.)
On wordpress.com that blog had 156 subscribers, and received 46,112 views (4.6K/month on average) from 28,123 visitors. Its most popular day was April 29, 2020 with 772 views. The visits picked up near the end of 2019, so in the past 5 years, the average views were 5.3K/month.
I don’t care that much but I’m pretty sure that after 10 years of being used to these figures (however artificial they are), I will feel the difference!
koalie.blog all time total views by months and years
The third cost, which I chose not to incur, is the tangible cost of redirection of a wordpress.com blog elsewhere on the Web. It costs € 13/year.
What I did instead was to trash all of my posts on the wordpress.com end and replace that blog with just one static page as homepage, and a blog post, announcing that the setup was going to expire and close in July 2024.
koalie.blog static page as homepage
Looks of my blog over the years
Screenshot of my My Opera blogScreenshot of the WordPress.com blog using the Bueno themekoalie.blog on wordpress.com using the Twenty Fifteen theme
My self-hosted wordpress blog using the Twenty Fifteen theme in white and light grey
For a few years I was a happy and fulfilled user of the iPhone app Metatext, a client for the federated social network Mastodon. When Metatext stopped being developed, I spent days reading comparisons, trying other clients, and settled on two which eventually matched all of my criteria:
Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots (subscription), a Mastodon Client for iOS & Mac.
I donate 0,99€ per month to the developer of Ice Cubes for Mastodon, and I pay the yearly subscription for Ivory (which costs 1,50€ per month.)
There are a 8 features specific to #IceCubesApp and 7 features specific to #ivory that I am really keen about. Since neither implemented them all, I continue to use both.
Ice Cubes
Ivory
Quote post transforms the quoted post into a card with embedded content
Boost/favorite from/as a different account
Featured hashtags surfaced on our own profile + clicking them filters only our own posts using that hashtag (Ivory’s implementation in v. 1.7)
Label in the timeline to denote posts displayed as a result of following a hashtag (Ice Cubes implements it as of 2023-12-04)
Add/edit filters via our own profile
App-integrated statistics for the rolling week, with bar graphs, directly in the tray
Private messages button in the tray
Ungrouped notifications
Filtering notifications in the notifications pane
Date format choice between relative & absolute (I’m a sucker for the latter)
Collapse long posts
Option to get a missing Alt text reminder
Auto-detect language when posting
Can send iPhone “stickers”
Displays all posts for a given followed hashtag (whereas Ivory apparently displays only a portion)
comparison table of features I love that are specific to each application
