If you are following this blog with RSS, you may have noticed some Wordles and other similar content showing up. I’ve excluded that again for now. I’ve been working on a sort of mini project I’ve wanted to set up for a while, and I even considered trying to write my own plug-in to do it, but it turns out there already is one.

Basically, Micro-Blog style posts, within this larger blog. In the past, this is the sort of thing I would have spun up an entire second WordPress Instance for, and then quickly forgotten about it after ten posts, and then folded it into the main blog, maybe. Ever since Twitter died, I have not really had a place for these sorts of posts, and frankly, I also never really cared to post them to places like Twitter anyway. Things like Wordle scores, the little image banners Duolingo spits out, a random Youtube Video with maybe some notes, or song lyrics, etc. I also have some random pictures of food that I’ve stuck in the Microblog section.

Basically, stuff I kind of want to keep a record of, but that doesn’t need a whole post or fanfare and that frankly, no one else probably cares about. It’s all there on that page linked above. I’m still messing with the formatting a bit.

What I’m using is a “secret backend page” with a plug-in called User Submitted Posts. It’s intended to let users submit posts easily to the blog, but as no one else should be able to register to post, and I’ve set the settings limited to admins, and the page is “secret”, I am the only one submitting. I also streamlined down all the settings. Everything goes into the Microposts category, and it only has boxes for a title, tags, post content, and uploads, all optional. It’s about as close to making a Microblog clone with WordPress as I can get. I’ve also verified that users not logged in can’t see or get to the posting page.

It’s also simple enough to set up a shortcut to the posting page on the home screen of my phone. In the pasty, I had tried using the WordPress App, but it’s just not suitable for quick posting of this style. You have to select tags and categories and go through menus, it’s just clunky for this purpose.