Michael Barrett
Micro.blog is a front-end to social media
I’ve been experimenting with Micro.blog long enough to say I’m not really experimenting any longer. I post something almost every day and I regularly have really positive interactions with community members.
Although there’s a community around Micro.blog it’s not really a social network. Micro.blog is mostly a publishing platform. It’s paid - it’s not costly - but a nominal fee keeps bozos away better than a barbed wire fence. I suspect, also, that the community managers would quickly moderate a spammer right out of existence - as I’ve seen no evidence of any spammy or creepy marketing behavior.
Writing on Micro.blog is fast and low friction. I use it primarily to capture links to artists I find interesting. I post a photo, a link, and some quick thoughts. This way I can go back and look at inspiring work later - but I can also share it with a receptive community.
Micro.blog’s founders are champions of the Indie Web - so they support multiple ways to import and export your posts to and from their service. You can push your work out to Github (I do this to make an automatic permanent archive of my posts) or publish to a number of blogging platforms using a shared standard. You can also export your entire Micro.blog as Wordpress XML file - which is supported for import by Squarespace and others. All of these options are a nice, warm, fuzzy security blanket.
I don’t feel trapped using Micro.blog.
So, I think Micro.blog is great. I can heartily recommend it. It’s fun and helps me stay creative and engaged. But it has a side-effect that I find freeing.
Micro.blog supports cross-posting to both Twitter and Facebook. If your post is too long for Twitter, it will be truncated with a link to the post on your public Micro.blog site. Photos are included with cross-posts. Neither Facebook nor Twitter support link formatting of any kind (because they’re terrible platforms run by goons) - so Micro.blogg’s cross-posting feature is smart enough to extract links and tack them on the end of your post.
If you want to share your work on the web, I think it’s very important to own your own website and have it be the source of “truth” for your online work. However, you can’t really escape the gravitational pull of these terrible shit-services like Facebook. It’s awful, but this is where your friends, family, and colleagues are online. You must meet people where they are.
By utilizing Micro.blog’s cross-posting feature - I can be active on both Facebook and Twitter - but I never actually have to log into either. I can post and post and share and share and never see that dumb bird or a nagging message to provide my phone number and blood type.
This was my last big multi-panel piece posted to Instagram.
I enjoyed having one large image merge into another - but it was constraining to try and make small post something worth looking at.
I think the end result is something like a movie poster
TDD and “genius” programmers - This is a great blog post which builds on a great Twitter thread - it’s worth reading both.
I love a clever redesign. Slightly tweaked binder clips make them easier to use.
This junk mail is incredible. Fake metal and plastic key, lots of heavy paper, all mailed in a clear plastic shell.
This is a chunk of a new work I’m rolling out on Instagram starting tomorrow. I’ve been using Instagram as an infinite canvas. This work will blend seamlessly with the previous. I’ve been working at 2700px x 3600px - breaking each image into 12 900px blocks as individual posts.
Lisa Golightly is a Portland-based artist who uses found photos as references for her work. She paints with acrylic and house paint (!)
Her paintings look like forgotten memories.
I’m running things through the printer twice or three times to build up an image in layers. Here are some paper studies on water color paper using this technique.
