One project I have been working on slowly over the past couple of years is "owning my own data"—in other words, making sure that I have local & backed up copies of the stuff I post to the internet. It started when I got off Goodreads. First I switched to StoryGraph, and then I decided that I wasn't using any of the site's features, and that I was better off just keeping my reading log in a text file. It has lived in my Obsidian notes for a long while, but now it also lives here on this website. Since I don't finish many books these days, it's easy enough to update the file when I do.

(At first I wrote "since I don't read a lot these days," but that's not true. I don't read as much as when I was in grad school, but I do read a lot. It's mostly for work, though, which means I'm usually hunting and gathering for what I need to teach a class or write an essay. I rarely finish a whole book, and I rarely log the dozens of books I one-third read for work reasons.)

I have a .csv of my historical Letterboxd data too, but it's going to take me a while to get it into a useful format that can be shared outside their platform. But today while poking around the IndieWeb, I discovered that Letterboxd creates an RSS feed of a user's recent activity, which means I can echo that feed here. I'm using echofeed to accomplish this. The service will grab any new movies I log; we'll see how much historical data I end up wanting to add by hand. I am going to guess it will not be the full 1,350 movies in my Letterboxd diary.

This note documents my evolving relationship with Web 2.0-style social media platforms.