Build it and don't tell anyone
This is the second episode of what may become several short-lived, spontaneous podcasts, recorded straight into a phone and published from my own site.
Doing it every day to build a habit and get better at it.
Today’s subject: why the files live here rather than in somebody else’s app – and what I found when I went looking through my own archive.
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Transcript
Good morning, it’s Sunday. Yesterday afternoon I came up with the idea of this self-hosted, self-published podcast where the audio files are saved on my own website, and there’s no need to interact with complicated proprietary podcast apps.
Even though I should stress, I intend this to go out on, you know, Apple Podcasts and Spotify and so on. That’s very important. In fact, today, this theme keeps coming up in the work I’ve been doing this last year, where I’ve been helping other people to build some kind of memoir of their lives, and therefore, I’ve been looking very much at my own archive and my own use of it, and capturing absolutely bloody everything.
In fact, this week, I saved… all of my social media archives on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn into what’s called a JSON file. It doesn’t really matter what it’s called. But a single file for all that stuff. And I’ve got a similar file for everything on my website, which comprises at least 1.2 million words. That’s just the bit on my website.
Turns out that I’ve left something like 130,000 words in comments on other people’s social media posts, just the comments, and the average length of those comments is six words. So, just imagine having to type 137,000 comments of about 6 words each, as if it was some kind of assignment that you’re given when you go to hell. Well, I guess it didn’t fit like that at the time.
It felt like a spontaneous desire to say something to someone. But anyway, here we are again. Here I am with my spontaneous desire to say something to someone.
Don’t know who, because I’m doing this as a podcast, so I won’t know exactly who, if anyone ever hears it. Hello you, you’re listening. I’m very glad to have you here. Whoever you are.
Um… So, I had all those files with all of that memory, and the thing that I noticed in exchanges with an LLM, an artificial intelligence thing, was that I’ve actually built so many things in the past, really, really great things. I’m really pleased with. I think they would have been really good if I shared them with people.
And I never told anybody, not anybody, ever.
So I’m trying to overcome that and stop doing that. So, yes, I am building this podcast on my website and I am going to experiment for a few days doing it. But I really, really want to try and break that habit and actually share this podcast with some people.
So if you happen to hear this one day, let me know. I’d be really glad. Um, my name, in case you don’t already know, is John-Paul Flintoff, and I don’t think there are many of us with that name.
So, if you look up John-Paul Flintoff, you’ll find my website, and I’m sure you’ll find a way to get in touch. Anyway, thanks for listening.