I’ve been trying to slide back into the habit of art as a hobby, and the most uncomfortable aspect of that for me is making it publicly visible.

As much as I enjoy over-engineering solutions, and as much time as I’ve spent thinking about how I might build the best possible hugo or 11ty or jekyll blog theme to accomplish this, I decided the best solution for now was something that works out of the box, with an established community.

The first part of this was to create an art-specific Instagram account, which I did a few months ago and shared among some close friends. I’d hoped to have more than a single post by the time I published this post, but moving house has gotten in the way of that.

The second part was creating an actual blog. My requirements are pretty simple:

• I want to use my own domain name
• I wanted easy syndication to some sort of established network, as well as RSS
• Crossposting to other social networks would be nice

Due mainly to familiarity, I went with tumblr. I knew I would be able to dig in and create my own layout with relative ease, if and when I have the time and energy.

Setting up a subdomain was pretty painless. This domain cmkm.dev is already on Netlify’s DNS, so all I needed to do was to go into Netlify’s domains management panel, add a cname for art.cmkm.dev, and then add the domain to the tumblr blog’s settings. It just worked, without any detectable delay. :party:

I can’t find any reference to this in tumblr’s help docs, but inspecting the currently-default tumblr theme, it still creates an RSS link by default:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://art.cmkm.dev/rss">

(I think, but don’t know, that this is generated for all blogs, rather than being theme-specific)

I discovered, when I tried to connect my tumblr account to Instagram, a couple of issues:

• Insta doesn’t support tumblr 2fa, so I needed to get a one-time app password to connect the accounts (not a big deal)
• Insta only allows posting to the primary blog associated with a tumblr account… this is a dealbreaker for me, as I want to keep my scribbles on a dedicated secondary blog

So, in the end, I’m going to be manually posting to both tumblr and insta, with automatic cross-posts from tumblr to twitter. It doesn’t quite satisfy the urge to build something from scratch, but it’s set up and ready to use, so I no longer have the excuse to not share things I make. Now I just need to find the time to actually make things to share, which is the harder part.

Over a month after initially writing this, I still haven’t had a chance to break out my scanner and actually get it rolling, but the blog exists.