After many years of publishing my Fridays Finds, I have given up. Even Mastodon has made their user interface so opaque that after an hour I could not find the favourites I had marked for the last month. They were available on my phone app but I cannot be bothered trying to transfer each favourite from the phone to the desktop, where I usually write my posts. So it’s the end of an era. The first Fridays Find was posted in 2009 and there have been a total of 458, all in the archives.
Perhaps a listen to Who broke the Internet would be appropriate. I am writing much less here in public because I do not want my work scraped by the large language models that feed the likes of Chat GPT.
Here is a lovely photo shared on Mastodon to close this series.
Au revoir mes amis.
Hi Harold – over a decade ago, your writing convinced me that Twitter was worth a try. Thank you. And the weekly / fortnightly / monthly Friday Finds often sparked something for me.
Oh the changes we’ve seen and the things I have learned.
Indeed! The changes we have seen.
Muchísimas gracias por todo lo que nos has dado. A muchos. A todos.
Un abrazo, Manuel
Gracias, Manuel!
I’ve just returned to my blog. Everything gets written there. I’m really enjoying that. And it’s easy to find later.
I’m going to see what new blogging rhythm I can establish this Fall. Probably something closer to my early blogging, with lots of short posts. Maybe I will post each individual find, with a comment.
I will miss your writing Harold. And I totally understand your decision too. Thank you for all you have posted
I’m sorry your workflow for saving and sharing has broken, Harold. I don’t know if Raindrop would work with Mastodon or not, but that’s the tool I use to save links on my phone and then share them on my blog.
Zapier and IFTTT both have ways to automate with Mastodon. It might be possible to automatically save your favorite posts to a spreadsheet or document that you can use for your Friday Finds.
Also, if you haven’t edited your robots.txt to block AI bots yet, you may want to do so. That’s not a perfect solution, but it’s one layer of protection that you might be interested in. (This article mentions their own service, which you can ignore, but the list of AI bots to disallow from your site looks accurate.)
https://datadome.co/learning-center/block-ai-bots/
Thanks for the recommendations, Christy. Yes, I’ve blocked robots.txt for what it’s worth. Anyway, it’s time for me to find some new workflows that are appropriate for the current state of the web.
I always look forward to reading about your thoughts, finds, and insights – I hope you can return to it in the near future (assuming it serves you). Thanks for making your site such a great place for learning and thinking.
Thank you, Joe. I will take some time to figure out the next pace of things.
I have figured out how to revive Friday’s Finds so the next one will be posted on 26 September :)