When I first started blog­ging fif­teen years ago, the process was sim­ple. I’d open up a file, hand-edit the HTML code and upload it to a webserver–those were the days! Now every social web ser­vice is like a blog unto itself. The way I have them inter­act is occa­sion­ally dizzy­ing even to me. Recently a friend asked on Face­book what peo­ple used Tum­blr for, and I thought it might be a good time to sur­vey my cur­rent web ser­vices. These shift and change con­stantly but per­haps oth­ers will find it an inter­est­ing snap­shot of hooked-together media circa 2012.

The glue ser­vices you don’t see:

• Google Reader. I still try to keep up with about a hun­dred blogs, mostly spir­i­tual in nature. The old tried-and-true Google Reader still orga­nizes it all, though I often read it through the Android app News­Rob.
• Diigo. This took the place of the clas­sic social book­mark­ing site Deli­cious when it had a near-death expe­ri­ence a few years ago (it’s never come back in a form that would make me recon­sider it). When­ever I see some­thing inter­est­ing I want to share, I post it here, where it gets cross-posted to my Twit­ter and Tum­blr sites. I’ve book­marked over 4500 sites over the last seven-plus years. It’s an essen­tial archive that I use for remem­ber­ing sites I’ve liked in the past. Diigo book­marks that are tagged “Quaker” get sucked into an alter­nate route where they become edi­tor fea­tures for Quak​erQuaker​.org.
• Pocket (for­merly Read it Later). I’m in the envi­able posi­tion that many of my per­sonal inter­ests over­lap with my pro­fes­sional work. While work­ing, I’ll often find some inter­est­ing Quaker arti­cle that I want to read later. Hence Pocket, a ser­vice that will instantly book­mark the site and make it avail­able for later reading.
• Flip­board is a great mobile app that lets you read arti­cles on top­ics you like. Com­bine it with Twit­ter lists and you have a per­son­al­ized read­ing list. I use this every day, mostly for blogs and news sites I like to read but don’t con­sider so essen­tial that I need to catch every­thing they publish.
• Ifttt​.com. A handy ser­vice named after the log­i­cal con­struct “IF This, Then That,” Ifttt will take one social feed and cross-post it to another under var­i­ous con­di­tions. For exam­ple, I have Diigo posts cross-post to Twit­ter and Flickr posts cross­post to Face­book. Some of the Ifttt “recip­ies” are behind the scenes, like the one that takes every post on Word­Press and adds it to my pri­vate Ever­note account for archival purposes.

The Public-Facing Me:

• Word­Press (Quak​er​ran​ter​.org). The blog you’re read­ing. It orig­i­nally started as a Move­able Type-powered blog when that was the hip blog­ging plat­form (I’m old). A few years ago I went through a painstak­ing process to bring it over to Word­Press in such a way that its Disqus-powered com­ments would be preserved.
• Twit­ter. I’ve long loved Twit­ter, though like many techies I’m wor­ried about the direc­tion it’s headed. They’ve recently locked most of the ser­vices that read Twit­ter feeds and reprocess it. If this weren’t hap­pen­ing, I’d use it as a default chan­nel for just about every­thing. In the mean­time, only about half of my tweets are direct from the service–the remain­der are auto-imports from Diigo, Insta­gram, etc.
• Tum­blr (Quack​Quack​.org). I like Tum­blr although my site there (quack​quack​.org) gets very few direct vis­its. I mostly use it as a “links blog” of inter­est­ing things I find in my inter­net wan­der­ings. Most items come in via Diigo, though if I have time I’ll sup­ple­ment things with my own thoughts or pic­tures. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly see this via the side­bar of the Quak­er­Ran­ter site.
• Face­book. It may seem I post a lot on Face­book, but 95 per­cent of what goes up there is imported from some other ser­vice. But, because more peo­ple are on Face­book than any­where else, it’s the place I get the most com­ments. I gen­er­ally use it to reply to com­ments and see what friends are up to. I don’t like Face­book per se because of its pater­nal­ist con­trols on what can be seen and its recent moves to force con­tent providers to pay for vis­i­bil­ity for their own fan pages.
• Flickr. Once the dar­ling of photo sites, Flickr’s been the heart­break of the hip­ster set more times than I can remem­ber. It has a ter­ri­ble mobile app and always lags behind every other ser­vice but I have over 4000 pic­tures going back to 2005. This is my photo archive (much more so than the fail­ing disk dri­ves on a suc­ces­sion of laptops).

Hon­or­able Mentions