Anyone who was watching my Twitter timeline or RSS feed today may have wondered why I was posting so many pictures of puppies. Basically, they were test posts for a new microblog feature that I’m going to try out here on DazeEnd.org.

Like most of you, I share the vast majority of my writing on Twitter rather than in this blog. But for a while now, I’ve been vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of so many of my thoughts being essentially owned by Twitter rather than me. This unease has recently been nudged to the surface by Manton Reece and some of his writing, so I’m starting a microblog here on this website to collect some of these thoughts that would have otherwise been stranded on Twitter.

I’m not giving up on Twitter completely, though. Most of the things I write on Twitter are snippets of conversations or other thoughts that I don’t necessarily want to preserve. Those will stay on Twitter. But some microposts—is that a thing?—I think are of interest on their own. These I plan to post to the DazeEnd.org microblog and mirror to Twitter. That should allow me to preserve and archive my thoughts on my own website and use Twitter just for distribution.

At least that’s my current plan. I’m sure that plan will change as I actually put the microblog into use, but at least for right now I feel more comfortable using Twitter more like a dumb pipe than as a permanent record. I’ll let you know how it goes.