You may have noticed that the frequency of blog posts on this site has significantly decreased in recent years. Like others, much of my social media output has moved over to Twitter. There are a number of reasons for this.
It is easier to connect with others, build an audience, and share your thoughts. As of today I have just under 40k followers. The ability to tweet using the thread functionality has made it relatively easy to do more long-form writing. In short, Twitter offers an immediate reward that simply can’t be duplicated on the traditional blog platform.
But with these opportunities comes drawbacks. One thing that has long concerned me is that I do not own the content generated on Twitter. If the company shuts down tomorrow, all is lost. Twitter also has yet to offer an accessible archive function. Content (especially threads) produced years ago—even if it went viral—is inaccessible to readers.
Finally, I miss the community that I worked hard to build over the years here at Civil War Memory. I am hoping to change this. You may have noticed the new navigation menu item called “Tweets.” I will now be able to tweet directly from this website to my Twitter page. The functionality is limited at this stage, but it offers a way to engage those of you not on Twitter and, most importantly, to once again centralize my content.
Check out the new page. Those of you familiar with Twitter will recognize the overall format. The content is arranged like blog posts with the most recent tweet at the top of the page.
There are examples of single tweets, but what I want you to focus on is the thread functionality. A twitter thread is a series of individual tweets connected to one another. On Twitter when you click on an individual tweet in a thread the entire thread appears. When you click on the “Show thread” link on this site, however, you will be taken to a new page that looks a lot like a traditional blog post. You can even comment on it. Pretty cool.
I am still working out a few kinks, but overall I am excited about the potential this new functionality offers to revitalize this site and connect with old friends and perhaps even some new readers.
Good news, especially your ability to preserve your work. And I’ll be glad of the comment facility!
It’s great that you can now kill two birds (or rather, preserve them) with one stone! However, we can’t respond to your tweets without going onto twitter, which I’d rather not do. But at least we now know where you’ve been, neither sick nor vacationing in the Antipodes! I hope you don’t neglect your monthly book reports, which I follow as a guide to future reading.
You can only respond to twitter threads that have been formatted into blog pages such as this one. I suspect that anything worth responding to will be in the form of a twitter thread. In the end my goal is to promote attention back to this website and it already appears to be working. Thanks for the comment.