Month: November 2024

A Walk in the Park

The Winter Garden at Dunedin Botanic Gardens
View of the Edwardian Winter Garden taken from the Rose Garden, Dunedin Botanic Gardens

It was a glorious late Spring day in Dunedin today and I headed out to the Botanic Gardens to take a few photos. Mainly some test shots with my Pentax K2. I picked up a practically as new edition of the camera for a song recently. It’ll be turning 50 next year.

I haven’t developed the film yet – black and white. I think I overexposed the first few shots as it was Fomapan 400 and as you can see from the digital shot above it was a very bright day. I was shooting in aperture priority. Once I realised that, I stopped my lens down to the f/8-f/16 kind of range and started getting shots below 1/1000.

Anyway, lovely day, photos taken, blog entry completed.

Setup

After a couple of days of learning-by-doing and troubleshooting I have finally got WordPress up and running, self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi. I’ve had this domain for a while and I reasoned it would be a good idea to use it. So I’m ready to cast my thoughts to the world.

I do have social media, and I’m relying on that as the avenue of discoverability for this blog – Google’s not too flash at that sort of thing now. And the concept of POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) appeals to me. I’m able to post a link to my blog entries on social media. With regular backups in place, I am unlikely to lose content to the enshittification or collapse of social media networks.

That said, there’s something retro or maybe even quaint about doing this. Blogs are so web 1.0. And while independent written content is still available through sources like Medium, the fact people pay for it – directly through subscriptions or indirectly through advertising – places the onus on the author to produce constant content at a consistent level of quality. I don’t desire that kind of pressure.

Another thing is that when I was considering this blog and was looking for how-tos, almost all of them were focusing on search-engine optimisation and specialisation to find an audience. But there’s one thing I want to be clear about:

My hobbies are not side-hustles.

In part this is me making a stand against how uniform the internet has become. I’m sure you’ve noticed this too: a typical recreational browsing session might be dominated by Reddit with a bit of YouTube thrown in for good measure. Or it could be staring at Instagram or TikTok for much longer than you planned. In reaction to that, I’ve started discovering the Indieweb – made by enthusiasts who are being the change they want to see. Bringing back diversity to the online experience, rejecting the algorithms designed to keep you engaged and browsing long enough to sell something.

I only hope I have something interesting to say.