Blog Bunny Illustration, two bunny ears standing behind an open laptop by Mervi Emilia Eskelinen

Social Publishing

A few thoughts on YouTube

For the past couple of months I have been reigniting my YouTube channel. Before that I had only posted one video of drawing a cat and that was it. But recently I have been adding Procreate drawing time lapses almost weekly, and have even posted a few little animations. Procreate is a popular drawing app for iPad and iPhone. It has an inbuilt feature which creates a time lapse video of your drawing process, which I have been sharing either as is or with little edits. Adding some music from YouTube to the videos. It has been also an interesting little exercise, which has prompted...

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Protect your online presence

Google search results have turned inaccurate, irrelevant and plain useless. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is laying off people en masse. Plus people are talking about a new tech bubble bust as technology stocks are plummeting. And then there's the trash fire called Twitter. Twitter hasn't been profitable since... ever really. With the new management the revenue has crashed. The company is bleeding money. There's desperation in air with the new attempts of raise profits. There has been talks about paywalling the app altogether.. It looks like the whole thing is going down...

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Thoughts about deleting old blog posts

Recently I finally finished a huge project I started a long time ago: recategorising my blog posts. My old categories and tagging system had turned messy during all these years, since it allowed creating new tags on the fly and applying multiple tags to each post. I needed to create some new rules. Now I have 10 preset categories, including my the subjects I blog the most. And each post can have one category. I still use the old tagging system too, because it helps with this site's internal search and linking blog post series. More categories can obviously be added, if needed. But I ca...

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Social media conversations suck

I've been sitting on this post for a while. It is a difficult subject for me. I'm afraid of sounding whiny, but also that this may be taken the wrong way. Perhaps someone I wasn't even thinking about here will take this personally. Maybe I will end up losing followers on some social media site. Maybe people will quit reading my blog. Or someone will decide against working with me, making some weird false assumptions about how I conduct myself. The thing is, I have a strange confession to make: I don't really like having conversations online. Especially at comment sections, forums, and su...

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New beginnings

It's been a while. I'm aware of that. Almost a year! There has been breaks before, week or months. But this long? Never. The break started as your usual not-feeling-like-it. I wanted to redesign my site, but either I didn't have the time and motivation or I was out of ideas. Seeing the site reminded me of this, trying to blog reminded me of this. Suddenly it had been a month. Then another, and another, and another. Finally, I felt a bit ashamed to blog again. It had been such a long time already. What would people say? Would anyone even bother to read it anymore? I dwelled into Insta...

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Dealing with Instagram spam

Since my older posts about getting rid of spam on Instagram and stopping and preventing your account from sending spam are still quite popular, I decided to revisit the subject with an updated post. Instagram has changed quite a lot between then and now. This includes many changes to the algorithms, which dictate the reach of your images. With all these changes, spam hasn't gone away. As a matter of a fact, spam has only evolved. Now you aren't only dealing with spambots, but also using spammy methods for growing otherwise legit profiles and their following and reach, is extremely comm...

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Why I am not leaving Twitter or Facebook

I have been mulling over leaving Twitter and Facebook, or at least using them much less. The thought on Facebook has been there for a while, because to the service is bringing people's awful sides out and the algorithms are making choices in my behalf. Over at Twitter the things have been getting worse and worse too. While bullies and white supremacists are reigning, the folks in charge of the service are sitting on their hands. Either they are ignoring the complaints, or are making pointless technical changes. And now, with the 280 character long Tweets enabled, my Twitter timeline...

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