Words On Wednesday

I've been playing around with Bluesky lately and building a bot to automatically share Words on Wednesday posts to that platform.   I'm not stranger to social media automation, but it's also never been my strong suit. Back in August of 2017 , I had automation set up for a few social media platforms with presumably OnlyWire . That worked for a while, but by August of 2018 , I had swapped to dlvr.it for my social media sharing needs. At some point along the line, probably around September of 2024, dlvr.it stopped sharing to my Words on Wednesday Facebook Page . Either that, or I was manually sharing those posts each week and just gave up. In either case, that page has been basically dead for over a year now. In the past year or so, I've made a point to visit Facebook less. It was my sort of default state when I would unlock my phone to visit Facebook and doom scroll for a bit. I recognized that because the algorithm prioritizes things that make you angry, I was s...

My posts have been mostly consistent lately, but I’m afraid that probably won’t last much longer. Confession, I’ve been writing a bunch while working my notice at Michelin. I was still satisfying my job requirements, but naturally I had less work to do while I was wrapping up my time with the company. As such, I had a pretty good amount of time available for other things. Days when I was in the office, I couldn’t do any work around the house, but I could still write. So I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. Pretty much everything posted between September 2021 and now was composed during that window. But I had the opportunity, so why not? Problem is, I’m writing this on my last day with Michelin. I start my new job on Tuesday. I can’t know how much spare time I’ll have with the new job, but I have to assume it won’t be as much as I have right now. Given the situation, I’m expecting I’ll slow or even stop posting again very quickly. I didn’t post at all between December 2020 and June 2021. ...

I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled second week Book Report post to give an update on why I haven’t posted since 21 November. I didn’t mean to miss a week. I had posts scheduled a few weeks out, back in early to mid-November. At the time, I figured I would have a few weeks to catch up on some things, and I would be able to write something before the first empty Wednesday passed. Unfortunately, that unscheduled day came and passed without any opportunity for me to write even a decent post. Then the next week came and went. And here we are, on the third week, before I publish anything. Thing is, I’ve been really busy lately. At work, at home, I just haven’t had the time to write. I still love writing, I just don’t have the chance right now. Therefore, I’m officially stating that Words on Wednesday will not be an every week thing, at least not for the next little while. Does this mean I’ll go a few weeks without posting, and then pick right back up writing every single week? Does...

You might not expect it to be difficult to automate posting to social media, but good lord, it is an absolute pain. I bring this up because Facebook recently changed their policy on sharing from third party tools. I’m not sure on all of the intricate details, but essentially, automatic sharing can only be done to Facebook Pages, and not personal Profiles. I have traditionally used tools to read the RSS feed of Words On Wednesday and share updates to my various social media profiles, so this means that I would no longer have my posts automatically share from my Facebook Profile. Since the vast majority of my traffic comes from Facebook, I would lose a lot of that without sharing my posts. After learning of this pending change, I began looking into different options. When Words On Wednesday was hosted on WordPress , I could use the baked in social media sharing options offered by WordPress itself. Once I migrated to Blogger, I had to look into alternatives. Blogger supports automatic...

I started blogging three years ago this week. Technically, it isn’t 3 years to the day. I started on August 27 ( https://jakehennett.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/words-on-wednesday-august-27-2014/ ), but considering this is Words on *Wednesday*, I figured it best to mark the date as the last Wednesday in August. Inevitably, there will be a few years where the last Wednesday in August will fall on the 27th again, but that won’t be every year. At this point, I don’t really know if it feels like I’ve been blogging for longer or shorter than 3 years. When I think about starting, I remember myself in college, but I had been finished with school for a year before I started. Logically, that would also put my start before getting married, but I got married a few months before then. It’s like I don’t remember a time when I didn’t keep a blog, but it truly wasn’t that long ago when I started. Obviously, I plan on continuing the blog for as long as I can. I’ve still got quite a few finished ...