Remodeling the Mountain Visions blog

Howdy subscribers, 

I posted a while back I was rededicating myself to the blog (and Flickr and other content host) and less Meta hosted/controlled content. Meta serves a purpose, sort of like an RSS reader, but it shouldn't be where the stories of your adventures are locked in forever. 

I'm slowly going through and updating abandoned/broken links in the sidebars and in general cleaning them up to reflect current information and things that are important to me.

I hope to eventually clean up the sidebars so they are useful again. I've already updated the broken aurora map and the Adirondack Ice Conditions and NH Avalanche conditions.

I've also fixed all of the subscribe options in the top left corner. So if you want to subscribe, I highly recommend Feedly but there are additional options below. I may also put an option for email subscription in the future. 

At this point most of the broken links have been removed. Any that remain are place holders so I can update them with current relevant information. 

I'll be chipping away at it as time allows. 

Thanks for viewing Mountain Visions!

Meta (Facebook) Walled Gardens...They were fun at first but now it's time to make information open again!

I've grown a little tired of the increasing walled gardens where your information is public but it's locked behind a information paywall of sorts that only benefits the site owner. 

Blogger (Google) makes money off these blogs for sure, or they would kill off blogger, but anyone can search for and access them.* And that means information is freely available. 

I've planned many a trip off a blog trip report that wasn't meant as a source of beta. Just folks musings. And I'm sure folks have done the same with Mountain Visions.  

Meta sites on the other hand (Facebooks parent company) still allow you to overshare but they hold all the information behind a sort of paywall. This benefits absolutely no one but Meta and actually is the entire antithesis of why the internet became so important. 

I think the big appeal early on with Facebook was your post were viewed by most of the folks you cared about.  People you likely interacted with in real life. Increasingly, feeds are clogged with ads and recommended post. And with people friending (follow) folks they don't even know feeds are getting clogged. It's basically turning into a Chinese style internet where everything is controlled by one company including what the algorithm wants you to see. Sure engagement is higher but thats as short term dopamine boost, not a long term solution. 

I've mused enough, the nitty gritty of my plan -though I've planned on this before- is to try to cross post for now to the blog also while (and this is the ambitious part), retroactively pull old Meta post and place them on the blog. I'm skeptical this happens with any volume, but I'd like to give it a shot. 

*Many search engines strongly priortize commercial, sales and paid sites. I use Mojeek when trying to find things I don't have to pay for. Like if you search "bikepacking" you'll get a lot of commercial sites. Or places to buy gear. That's great, but I want to search trip reports and personal blogs. Mojeek does that best. And also, although it's Russian, Yandex tends to be better as well. Especially for image searches.