All New Rivetings
Happy New Year, one and all. Hope you’re all raring to go for a marvellous 2013.
At some stage, I’ll be writing up a “year ahead” post as I did last year with the ‘2012 – Making Things‘ post. And may well even review that, and give the a mark for each section.
But first of all, quickly, I thought I’d talk about Rivetings.
Rivetings was a tag I used in Instagram over the last year or so, to automatically post things from there to here (using IFTTT, of course). Its purpose was to gather scraps of ideas and put them somewhere that helped fit into the larger pieces of Smithery work and streams of thought; rivets that hold bigger ideas together. That was the idea, at least.
A couple of things came together to change how I thought about it.
Firstly, somebody observed that the blog feed had become too reliant on the rivets; it wasn’t holding anything together, just a collection of small ephemera. It might have meant something to me, but without the bigger pieces, it meant little to anyone else. It was boring. Which isn’t good.
Secondly, I left Instagram, after the whole stramash with the terms of service.
There’s plenty being written about all that, and why people are leaving and the like (the Ryan Block piece is fairly sensible on all that), so I needn’t add much more, save to say that Facebook achieved something seemingly impossible in making me trust them even less.
The idea of Rivetings then remains important, but I had to find a way to collect the rivetings together with some greater degree of sophistication and tagging, and stream the collection separately, so people could dip in and out as they saw fit.
As of today, you’ll see a separate rivetings page in the menu here on the site, which is powered by a new public flickr account I’ve set up (and, incidentally, imported all of my Instagram pictures into).
The gallery on the rivetings page is powered by a great WordPress plugin called, fittingly, Awesome Flickr Gallery.
If you still want to follow that separately, you can add me as a contact in Flickr, or following the RSS feed for the photostream.
Ok, let’s get on with the year…