Website flexibility

I think there are many types of "content" that we default to posting on centralized silos, whether that's Goodreads, Instagram, Foursquare, or Reddit. But all of that becomes much more interesting when it's just as easy to post to our blogs.

I was thinking about what Manton said in his P&B interview and he's right. That's one of the main advantages of owning your place on the web: you can bend it and shape it to do exactly what you need it to do.

And coincidentally it's also one of the reasons why I love to run my sites on Kirby. I just love how easy it is to customize it and make it do different things. For example, I wanted the P&B posts to look a bit different but I didn't want to make the rest of the sites heavier with extra CSS.

The obvious solution is to conditionally load those extra resources only on specific posts and there are a bunch of different ways for me to do that in Kirby. I could create a new post type, call it pb.txt, and then check if the page uses said template. Alternatively, I could add a toggle inside my regular template to mark a specific post as a P&B post but that would store extra information in every single post on the site.

What I ended up doing was checking if the title starts with P&B because I already decided that I wanted the posts to have a prefix to make it easier to spot in the archive. And now I have a global variable I can check anywhere on the site and add my customizations.

Another example of what Manton was mentioning is my Moments posts which are essentially Instagram posts. I used to have a dedicated Moments In Time website but I retired it and moved everything back to my blog. For these posts, I built a dedicated RSS feed this way if someone is only interested in my pictures they can subscribe to that feed and have an Instagram-like experience without the ads and tracking nonsense.

These are the things that make having a custom website so much better than relying on social media.