Dave’s Downtime

So, I went on a personal retreat.

Lots of reasons why. Things haven’t been too great lately and there has been a lot of stilted self-reflection going on.

But after the stress-before-holiday, then stressful holiday with crap weather and a 7 year old…then massive stress when coming back…..Monster Jam….I’ve had to have a bit of pause…get some therapy….and dial up the introspection.

So with some planning and a significant cost….I managed to take myself away for two nights at Pether’s Rainforest Retreat .

I don’t think I’ll go into a lot of detail here….but I’ve been relatively true to David Spark’s Personal Retreat formula….with idealised roles with Arete ( I really like that ), Big Questions and Delight/Dread.

I didn’t get enough pure focus time to do Closing Ceremonies…..but the actions have been coming thick and fast…..and I did devote a significant amount of time to relaxing. Tai Chi in the rain forest, good food, a bed I got restful sleep in ( underrated in accomodation ), a kick-arse massage and a full jacuzzi with a woodland view.

All in all a very productive and calm time.

Now I consider some things that I think I need from my platform.

Privacy. Legacy micro-site hosting. A move to greater interactivity.

Let me expand on each in turn:

Privacy - By this I am only keeping my own site in scope. The basic requirement is to be able to keep a post private or hidden. It has a status and it is not able to be accessed, with either authentication….or more likely, that the URI is previously known. But no timeline and no crawling.

I also have a number of questions and concerns about how web crawling, particular around generative AI/ML.

Host some old basic sites - Using the upload function of Micro.blog, I can expose HTML and images files for rendering and this works really quite well. The “ask” here is the ability to create folders, in the underlying file-structure. Permissions would need read/write for the blog owner….everyone else should be good with read-only. I know that this is a big request and it is highly likely that this can not be implemented for a myriad of reasons. Backward compatibility is a great thing….and it includes good security.

Greater Interactivity - This is still very much ill-defined. And I think a lot of the work remains with me. The three technical things that I need to research are comments, user counter and cross-posting. I am sure there are a number of plugins that can help here.

Comments - This is needed mainly for non-existent audience members who are not Micro.blog users. I’m finding the recent Post Once Syndicate Everywhere conversations quite interesting, but I still unsure about how replies are going to work.

User Numbers - I’ve looked at a couple of options and these either require money or for me to sell my soul to some large conglomerate. More research to be done by me here. Any suggestions are greatly welcome….although I am still unsure how you will get these to me.

Cross-posting - The big question here is to where? I don’t really engage anywhere else….and this is my choice ( see comments above about soul purchasing and a more general [negative] social media post ). I need to get Mastodon integrated properly….but roll on Activity Pub….it promises so much.

I guess that is the end of the wishlist. The key thing I think that I need to keep in mind here is…..don’t allow these to become reasons not to continue to produce and enjoy.