Time for a quick summary of what’s been posted on the site recently, a technical change on the site that I’m quite pleased about, and some early thoughts about Meta’s so-called rival to Twitter, Threads, in its first week of public access.
Here’s a run-through of the new posts since the last of these updates.
Looking back at some old content I realised that there were a whole load of photos still unpublished from one of our earliest trips to Yorkshire, so adding to the trip we took there in 2011 is a set from a walk around the seaside town of Whitby, famous for Dracula, an abbey, goths, Captain Cook, whalebones, and, for us, location of one of the worst things you can do to a pint of beer.
The other three posts on the site all come from the second of our Sky Princess cruises last year, and all from the day we docked in the Norwegian port of Skjolden. With it being our first time there we naturally took an excursion to see what things of interest to a tourist there were to see.
Our day in Skjolden was an overcast one with a little bit of drizzle and lots of very low cloud that made driving up over the highest mountain pass in northern Europe an atmospherically foggy experience. Our first couple of stops were to a viewing platform from which we could see nothing and then to the Mefjell Crossing Memorial Stones.
The main part of the trip was to a small village nestled around where a few rivers met in a huge and thunderous cascade, to visit a museum of glacier archaeology and the Lom Stave Church. On the way back from there we also took a look at the impressive but rather controversial Saga Column.
Our drive back over the mountains gave us lots of fantastic views of Norwegian landscapes before we made a stop at the Åsafossen Waterfall. Also there was an interesting monument to the philosopher Wittgenstein and if you read the article then you can discover what happens when a bus going downhill meets a van coming uphill through dense cloud and with no room to pass.
A quick bit of nerd-related stuff connected to the technical running of this site now. As you can probably guess even if you didn’t know for sure, this site is powered by WordPress and it’s got quite a few customisations on it that I’ve made over the years. One of those is the Tags page which groups the tags alphabetically and has a special grouping for dates too because I just like to be able to find things and connect things easily.
However, one of the things that’s annoyed me for a long time is that when WordPress shows what it calls archive listings – and that includes lists of blogs, lists of custom post types, categorised posts, search results, and, yes, tagged posts – it does them in reverse chronological order. That’s worked for the most part but because I like to tag each trip or cruise and use that as the link from the menu it’s made reading them awkward as everything is listed backwards and you generally needed to skip a few pages to start at the beginning, assuming you ever would. I could’ve changed the published date on every post but, yeah, no. I finally realised that I could hook into the code and override the sorting order if the page was displaying tags, though, so that’s what I’ve done. Now, if you click through on any tags you’ll see the oldest content first, so if you were to look at our first cruise – Diamond Princess, Far East 2008 – or the first time we flew up to Iceland for the weekend – Iceland 2015 – then the posts are more-or-less in order of what we saw. It doesn’t always follow because sometimes I’ve posted content from later in a trip before that which occurred earlier – I like to be a little eclectic with my write-ups just to keep the content fresh and you on your toes – but it mostly works for older travelogues and will almost certainly work for the more recent ones as I’ve been a bit more disciplined in writing in sequence.
Finally, Threads has been released to the public this week. This is Meta’s microblogging option and what a lot of people see as the rival to the rapidly-tanking Twitter. The timing was great, coinciding with a nice long breakdown on Twitter and news that the only way to view it properly – Tweetdeck – would become a paid option, effectively ending my use of it at all now.
I just know you want to know some of my thoughts about Threads.
First, Threads will replicate a lot of what Facebook initially did – short status updates – but with a more public-facing set-up rather than the friends and family thing that Facebook does. Which does beg the question: why not build this off Facebook code rather than Instagram, as they’ve done? The likely answer is numbers of active people and the type of posts they make on Instagram lends itself more to the Twitter-like environment Meta is after than Facebook (which is where your relatives hang out to discuss racist and homophobic things). Connected to that is hype, and Zuckerberg craves that attention much like all the people posting selfies on Instagram do. Threads connecting with Instagram followers then highly pushing updates from, sigh, influencers did a lot to drive talk and boost a lot of already-inflated egos early on.
Okay, so Threads looks pretty nice for a first release, but functionally it stinks. I know that Meta has focussed on fixing bugs this first week and will be releasing new functions soon, to include edit options and a filter to just show people you’re following and searching, and it really, really needs that latter one. You can’t have a platform touted as a place to have nice conversations if you can’t find the conversations and right now you haven’t got a hope. There’s not even hashtag support yet, and that’s going to be crucial to capture that live event, everyone talking about it on Threads and not Twitter thing that will really help to sink Elon Musk’s white elephant.
Speaking of elephants, Threads is supposed to gain support for ActivityPub at some point. A lot of people on Mastodon hate this idea because they’re idiots who don’t understand what that will mean and have some unfounded fears about what could happen, but it ultimately should mean I’ll be able to follow and reply to the people I already follow on Threads but from my Mastodon account, and that means I won’t be subject to tracking, I won’t be subject to the ads that will inevitably have to appear on Threads at some point, and I won’t be subject to the algorithm that keeps trying to tell me what Georgia Toffolo is up to. I couldn’t care less about her.
Right now, Threads is annoying Elon, and that’s a good thing, but it needs to improve quickly to keep the momentum going as there are already leaked emails revealing Musk wants more and more features on Twitter quickly to compensate for his mental flaccid penis. Hopefully, they’ll each break the site a little more each time.
As to what I’d like to see and use from Threads: well, I used to enjoy Twitter and talking to travel and cruise people a lot there. It was a good meeting point for live events, and getting in touch with cruise lines in particular. Sadly, a lot of the Twitter crowd started to isolate themselves on their own Facebook pages and YouTube channels where they could foster an image or brand, lord it over their serfs, and sell themselves to companies looking to ply them with free trips, hosted events, etc. I don’t blame any of them at all, but it was sad to see. Twitter became more of a ghost town for this sort of chat but a lot of those people still remained active on Instagram at least, posting photos and asking questions they couldn’t care less about the answer to in order to drive interaction. It would be nice, therefore, to see some of that chat make it onto a more text-based platform like Threads where not every post has to be of the person’s face obscuring the scenery of wherever they’re trying to make you feel jealous of. But in truth, I suspect the time for that sort of thing has come and gone.
Anyway, must think about packing soon. Off on a cruise next week, don’t you know?