Category: sethwCategory: sethw

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Recently I said to make your own Twitter.

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.

An updated “news feed” gives fans a reason to visit your site.

Making your own “Twitter” means you start owning your deep thoughts and random ideas, rather than leasing them to other platforms (yes, even Substack Notes) for them to monetize and build upon.

If you’re using WordPress, you can add a basic feed to your site pretty easily.

1. Start adding posts under the Aside post-type, which WordPress describes as “typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.”
2. Add a new Category where your “feed” will go under. I called mine Daily Feed, with a category description of “Like a social media feed, but on my own site.”
3. After you’ve got a few posts, add the “Ultimate Category Excluder” plugin. Once installed, select your new feed category so it’s not in your main feed. You can also exclude it from your RSS feed.
4. Add a link to your feed category in your main menu bar, so people can find it.

Our pal Casey says you can do this another way, too:

You can use the Posts or Post Grid/Carousel block and set it to only include posts from a specific category.

If you’re trying to do this on SquareSpace, I found this on their forum:

“What you want, images, videos, and next/previous pages are standard features with Squarespace blog pages. If you desire a newsfeed to be separate from other types of blog posts, use a page of summary blocks or a second blog page (the summary blocks are more versatile than the normal blog post listing page).”

And check out the good feed example from PappasBland photography using Cargo.

Again, we do this to have control of our writing, our photos, our music.

Sure, our work exists on Spotify and Youtube and Instagram and Substack and everywhere else you choose.

But now, for example, when I make a post on Substack Notes, I will be adding that note to my own site, as well.

Our sites then becomes a place for existing fans to appreciate our day to day work without being surrounded by the noise of social media feeds, without the need to be active on several other platforms.

And when new people discover our site, they can learn about our work without being sent to another platform, one which they might not even have account for (like TikTok, which U.S. new users can no longer download).

With a news feed on your website, you control the branding, the tone, the vibes. The potential reach is much lower, of course, but you’re building a body of work with potential to be discovered by anyone on the open web.

From Create Digital Media:

YouTube has disabled the account of plugin developer Sinevibes, citing violations of the platform’s “spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.” There’s no rational reason for that, and it’s the latest chilling example of how severely dominant tech platforms can disrupt businesses.

The article goes on to explain how a lot of this is automated, and that some of these companies are just so big that this sort of stuff happens, but my goodness this is frustrating.

1. Start adding posts under the Aside post-type, which WordPress describes as “Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update.”
2. Add a new Category where your “feed” will go under. I called mine Daily Feed, with a category description of “Like a social media feed, but on my own site.”
3. After you’ve got a few posts, add the “Ultimate Category Excluder” plugin. Once installed, select your new feed category so it’s not in your main feed.
4. Add a link to your feed category in your main menu bar, so people can find it.

I’m getting in the habit now of making sure anything I post on Substack Notes also gets posted to this Daily Feed category, which you can see in action here.

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can should have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website, and keep them there. Give them something to dig into on your domain name, rather than shuffling them off for other companies to monetize your work.

Here are some examples of people who’ve added their own Twitter-like feeds to their sites:

• Sketch Book Niabi (and here’s a post talking about it)
• Pappas Bland’s Feed
• The Ripple Maker Daily Feed

If you’ve made a “feed” on your site, please let me know and I’ll add it here!

 

 

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1. PROVIDE A GREAT NIGHT OUT

I found this clip of Quentin Tarantino railing against the current movie industry, via Ted Gioia’s “The Infrastructure of the Recording Industry Is About to Fail.”

Making movies is a much lower priority. Films are just too risky—especially anything fresh or different or daring.

It’s gotten so bad that filmmaker Quentin Tarnatino now says that he would rather write a stage play…

What I love about this bit is giving the audience a great night out.

Yes, it’s always about the art, of course.

But putting your art into a new setting (in this case, Tarnatino doing theater), makes for a great experience for the audience, which is energy, which is what any artist wants to feel when displaying their work.

Below you can see olivia rafferty performing at a museum in front of a T-Rex.

Playing in a museum on a Friday night is not the same as playing a bar on a Friday night. Put your work in front of different crowds and see what happens.

Where can you showcase your magic in a new way? How can you go about displaying your work in front of people more willing to accept it?

2. REGISTER FOR MY ABOUT “ABOUT PAGES” WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST

◼️ FREE with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

3. RECREATE EVENTS IN YOUR SPACE

Tim McFarlane Studio was part of Tiny Room For Elephants (TRFE) in Philadelphia, PA in years past. It was an event that combined multiple artists making work while musicians and DJs and producers performed live at the same time.

Tim brought elements of that into his own studio by inviting local producer / musicians into his studio to make music while he made art.

Read all about it here.

Are there ways you can combine your work with someone else’s work?

4. MAKE YOUR OWN TWITTER

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.