For longer than I can remember I've used the services of paper.li to post a daily twitter summary at 12.43 Australian east coast time to where else, twitter.
No more.
I've been running in freetard mode, using a basic account to provide a daily summary of the most popular tweets of both myself and the people I follow.
As I've said elsewhere, I started using twitter as a way of sharing interesting snippets with my team, colleagues and indeed anyone who wanted to follow me. Over the years my feed has changed from being focused on digital preservation and archiving with a bit of classical and medieval history thrown in for amusement, to a mixture of material about history, cultural repatriation and a smidgin of technical stuff - especially after I retired and no longer had a team of people.
The paper.li thing came about because some people asked me if I could post a summary every so often, and I was too lazy to write a script to do it for me, and what's more, paper.li added value in picking other popular posts from people I follow.
So I started pushing out an automated daily summary using their service.
Well, all good things come to an end.
For perfectly understandable reasons, the paper.li people have recently started being less generous as regards what you got with a basic (free) account, and I didn't want to pay for a pro account.
I suppose if I had my own consultancy and more importantly, it made money, I could have claimed a pro subscription as marketing, but I don't, so I havn't, and being genuinely retired I have no external lines of funding to tap.
As an aside, this is a little commented on problem with volunteer working (or if you're grand citizen research) - everything from my blue nitrile gloves for handling artefacts at the pharmacy to my Office 365 subscription comes out of my own money. I don't begrudge a cent of it, after all, it helps keep me sane, but there are limits as to what I can reasonably afford.
So, the long and short of it was that when you looked at what you got from the new basic plan it wasn't worth continuing.
I did think about compiling a weekly summary, but rejected that idea - explorator is better established and does a better job, and I'm not sure if I can deliver the commitment required.
So that's it, I'll still keep tweeting about the stuff that interests me, but there will be no more 12.43 summary carefully timed for an Australian lunch break ...
No more.
I've been running in freetard mode, using a basic account to provide a daily summary of the most popular tweets of both myself and the people I follow.
As I've said elsewhere, I started using twitter as a way of sharing interesting snippets with my team, colleagues and indeed anyone who wanted to follow me. Over the years my feed has changed from being focused on digital preservation and archiving with a bit of classical and medieval history thrown in for amusement, to a mixture of material about history, cultural repatriation and a smidgin of technical stuff - especially after I retired and no longer had a team of people.
The paper.li thing came about because some people asked me if I could post a summary every so often, and I was too lazy to write a script to do it for me, and what's more, paper.li added value in picking other popular posts from people I follow.
So I started pushing out an automated daily summary using their service.
Well, all good things come to an end.
For perfectly understandable reasons, the paper.li people have recently started being less generous as regards what you got with a basic (free) account, and I didn't want to pay for a pro account.
I suppose if I had my own consultancy and more importantly, it made money, I could have claimed a pro subscription as marketing, but I don't, so I havn't, and being genuinely retired I have no external lines of funding to tap.
As an aside, this is a little commented on problem with volunteer working (or if you're grand citizen research) - everything from my blue nitrile gloves for handling artefacts at the pharmacy to my Office 365 subscription comes out of my own money. I don't begrudge a cent of it, after all, it helps keep me sane, but there are limits as to what I can reasonably afford.
So, the long and short of it was that when you looked at what you got from the new basic plan it wasn't worth continuing.
I did think about compiling a weekly summary, but rejected that idea - explorator is better established and does a better job, and I'm not sure if I can deliver the commitment required.
So that's it, I'll still keep tweeting about the stuff that interests me, but there will be no more 12.43 summary carefully timed for an Australian lunch break ...
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