Introducing the Social Sidebar

2021 Jan 28

I've wanted to bring an aspect of social media more prominently to SWAG for a while now. Nothing too overt, but our lives touch so many other platforms these days that it seems like a waste if there's not some degree of communication with those platforms happening. This is VERY rudimentary on my part right now. Before the upgrade, I had twitter integration that would post links to new artwork. I need to get that re-established and maybe expand it. For the time being, if you weren't aware that there was a SWAGOnline twitter account, now you are.

Second, I've gone ahead and started a Discord server for us. I'm committed to being in it, and there are a few other people aware of its existence. Seghast had suggested it in another thread and I whole heartedly agreed. IRC is not for the faint of heart, and Discord is so easy and ubiquitous without being Slack. It seems like a good place for us to be. As people join, we'll add some more moderation features, but it seems like a good way to bring a level of "real time" back to the community.

You might notice that a few things are pretty glaringly missing. We have a SWAG group on FB, but I also have a (private for now) SWAG page. I don't think I can setup any sort of automation features to the group, but I apparently can with the page. I've been reading up on the API, and it seems fairly straight forward enough. I'll look into this more, and if I get something working, we can have a broader conversation about it. Likewise, I don't have instagram up here. I'd be open to doing it if people wanted to, but twitter is just links to content, FB kind of scrolls away pretty quickly, insta seems like a different critter. I don't know how people would feel about it, so I'm just putting it on the table here as a possibility. Let me know what opinion (if any) you have about it. I'm kind of meh either way.