A More Or Less Async Feed Of What I’m Up To

I made quite a few modifications to my site since my last changelog.

• Published/updated some pages
• Added new menu items
• Removed some irrelevant social media links
• Nixed the IG feed at the bottom of my site
• And replaced the above with what I’m now having lots of fun using — portfolio projects, more on this in a bit!

I’ve been constantly searching for a way to integrate a feed of images into my site. Images that, for the most part, represent daily moments I think are significant. I of course know ways and workarounds to achieve this:

• IG Feed — a straightforward method but limiting. First, the feed is coming from a third-party platform. Secondly, I like to keep my IG account exclusive to only my close circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances of my choice. Almost everything I share here is not free for the world to view. So in other words, no bueno.
• ‘Image’ Posts — I tried this a while back as a microblog experiment during my last team meetup. The thing about doing this is it doesn’t quite capture the essence of the type of ‘micro’ publishing experience I’m looking for.
• Manual Updating — This is publishing a static page with images, then when I have something new, I’d go back to that page and add the new images. This is too stone age for my liking.

And then I discovered the beauty of Portfolio Projects. I know I’m not using it exactly for its designed purpose, but it’s working how I want it to.

When it comes to publishing posts, I’m inclined to writing in long-form. During my microblog experiment in Shirahama, I still ended up writing short descriptions to accompany my image posts, but these were literally just fleeting thoughts that I still felt didn’t deserve a post of it’s own or belong in the Reader feed.

I just wanted to highlight a picture like the way I would on IG, but not have it published in the Reader. Like I mentioned previously, if I publish something, it’s going to be long-form.

That’s where portfolio projects come in. Using a combination of adding projects, my current theme design, and portfolio shortcode, I was able to achieve an IG-like feed at the bottom of my site.

The whole idea stemmed from when I created my Office Today page.

On this page, I wanted to have a gallery of featured images I’ve taken at my various ‘offices’, but at the same time I also wanted it to dynamically update whenever I added a new one. I also did not want or need these updates to be in the Reader. The portfolio functionality + shortcode seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

And then I thought, if I could do this on a single page, what if I could do it in the footer of my site? Sure enough, using a text widget in Rosalie’s conveniently placed ‘pre-footer widget area’, I was able to place the shortcode there to display all projects which would go on to serve as my ‘what I’m up to’ feed.

I created some basic project types for common images I usually post on i.e. food, office today, places, things.

Since portfolio projects function the same way as posts, I’m also able to add additional content to my liking.

The icing on the cake would have been if the mobile app had the ability to publish portfolio projects, then that would have been oh so sweet money sauce… I might just need to send that idea to our developers.

In the meantime, if you are interested in staying ‘in the loop’ with what I’m up to with this current experiment (although I think it’s here to stay), the only way to check is either by visiting the front-end of my site to see if I posted something new (portfolio projects don’t get published in the Reader), or by perhaps following my Twitter, the only social media account I have that I’m willing to Publicize these updates on.

You might actually find me posting more of these micro updates than I would for actual posts like these now 😅