Vanessa Hamshere

Introduction

Hello. I'm Vanessa, a relative newbie in the Indieweb.

Vanessa Hamshere

Musician, photographer, mild geek - the day job just gets in the way

blog.vanessahamshere.uk

Elsewhere: hazardwarning

10Centuries micro.blog

Instagram

I work as a manager in an outsourcing company and my current role does include some technical elements.

Mostly I prefer to be defined by my hobbies rather than my day job: musician, photographer, crafter. I play quite a range of instruments: keyboards (piano, organ, piano accordion), guitars (plus mandolin and ukulele), flute. No brass or read-based woodwind. I enjoy taking photographs and I knit, sew, crochet, bead, do calligraphy - I'll have a go at making most things.

My Indieweb site is blog.vanessahamshere.uk which is powered by WordPress. I have other blogs currently hosted on 10Centuries.org - hazardwarning for longer blogging and mydnyghtrose for craft-related posts.

I'm still on the silos: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, but find myself using them less and less, particularly Twitter. Most of my social engagement is via Micro.blog, 10C Social, Plurk and various Slack groups.

Working On

At the moment I'm still at the stage of refining my blog so it can do the things I want it to. I use it as at short post stream which feeds across to Micro.blog and pulls in replies to my posts as comments. Inspired by the 2019 summit, I managed to get micropub working, after sorting out Indieauth, which seemed to have stopped working (looking at you, Dreamhost). The instructions provided when running the Indieauth script were spot on; it just took me a couple of goes to get it right on my site. Now this has been fixed, I am trying out microsub/pub using existing servers/apps. I don’t think running my own server is something I’m ready for yet, though never say never.

I would still like to be able to pull in rss feeds that I follow, possibly into a private area, just for me. Ditto Goodreads, though maybe not private. I have set up a new menu item which displays just "Read" categories. I hope to add more over time - experimenting with this at the moment.