Matthew Lang

The boys pitched in this afternoon and tidied up the back garden. Leaves were raked away, patio furniture cleaned down and stored away, golf nets and mats put away, and we topped up the bird feeder.

We then got the Christmas tree and decorations out and put them up all around the house. It’s nice having to look forward to over the next few weeks.

The Lang household is ready for winter.

There is a lot of online chat about why losing Twitter might be okay.

I’ve read a few threads on Reddit, Micro.blog and Twitter itself that we would be better off without Twitter. It’s a convincing argument.

Twitter has become different from its early days of tweeting by text with 140 characters. The platform has grown into a platform for the world. It broadcasts news updates, provides coverage of sporting events and scores, updates on critical political events, and acts as a marketing platform for thousands of organisations and millions of people.

In the last few years, though, Twitter has become something else. A battleground. A place where discussions can often fall into threads of trading insults at each other. A place where people, governments and organisations can pedal lies with minimal accountability. A place where people can hide behind their avatars and threaten others without being held accountable. Twitter has tried to deal with these negative experiences over the years with content moderation and enforcing the platform’s rules, but it still happens.

I might be painting Twitter as a terrible place, but there are positives to Twitter. Although I’m not a frequent tweeter, the content from the people I follow on Twitter is of value.

I’m under no doubt that many others are happy with their Twitter experience. They follow the accounts they want to, scroll through their timelines and share and interact with others on the platform as they want to. If the world is better off without Twitter, will these people be better off without it too?

Regular bloggers and those who know their way about the web will largely agree that the world is better off without Twitter. They can continue writing and posting from the platforms they enjoy using. What about the people who genuinely want the ease of Twitter and what it brings to them?

If Twitter were to disappear, I’m sure I would find alternative means of following others through different platforms and means. What about those who are not so Internet savvy? They might need help finding an alternative means of following others, which leads me to think that we’re not better off without Twitter. Well, not at the moment. The web is still an excellent platform, and this could change.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been migrating several Rails applications to Hatchbox. I’ve still got a couple of applications to go. Still, one last thing I wanted to do was migrate my blog over to DigitalOcean’s Apps platform.

I’ve been using Render to host my blog for the last few months. While it’s free, and I have been okay with using it, I’ve wanted to minimize my digital footprint of the services I use. Over the weekend, I spent almost eight hours trying to get my blog to compile and run on DigitalOcean.

Sadly, my blog wouldn’t compile due to the Tailwind integration I am using. An error with the Jekyll PostCSS gem kept breaking the building of the website. I’m still digging into the actual issue, but it is getting parked until I have more time to look into it.

I started another minilog yesterday.

That’s 12 notebooks mostly completed over the last year. I say mostly completed, as there’s a couple of notebooks in there that I didn’t finish. It’s been a good daily exercise over the last year and I’m going to continue it through to next year. Also, it gives me something to do with my Field Notes subscription!

I’ll also start sharing a few pages from them again as they are completed.

With Ethan playing the last round of a competition at Longniddry Golf Club today, Jen, Drew, and I decided to wander around the surrounding area.

We had already planned to take a walk along Longniddry Bents. Despite the usual grey weather that Scotland is famous for, the walk along the beach was great. We then headed into Cockenzie and Port Seton, but with little to do there, we had a look to see what was nearby.

We decided to head there because Rosslyn Chapel was just a half hour away. We were a few minutes late for the tour’s start, which allowed us to take some great pictures of the outside of the chapel while everyone was inside getting the guided tour. The inside of the chapel was just as beautiful as the outside. Particularly the Apprentice Pillar and the many carvings on the pillars and arches inside the chapel.

All in all, it was a pretty great day.