Blogging on the open social web - and more exciting features

ATmosphere — referring to the growing ecosystem of applications built on the AT Protocol, a federated protocol for open social platforms.

Not to be confused with the atmosphere (the layer of gas surrounding our planet), or the kind of atmosphere you'll find at a hipster coffee shop.

AT-tention bloggers !! @pckt.blog ☃️❄️🌨️ has arrived in the ATmosphere. Since the early days of our development, we have been immensely interested in building out features to support ATproto and the open social web.

We have worked closely with other long-form publishing platforms like @Leaflet and @Offprint to collaborate on a shared data structure for storing blog details and posts in your very own Personal Data Server. If you're more technically inclined, more information about this project can be found here: Standard.site.

Okay, okay—enough of the tech jargon, what does this mean for you?

It means your writing can grow with you over time, and live alongside the rest of your social data without the need for multiple accounts. We want pckt.blog to be something you can trust long term. By storing your posts in the ATmosphere, your work isn't locked up or controlled by a single company. It's controlled by you.

The most obvious feature is that you can now bring your identity from another space, like Bluesky, Blacksky, self-hosted servers, and more! If you already have one of these accounts, there's no need to make a new one for pckt.

If you're new to pckt, you can start writing from your handle here:

If you're an existing pckt blogger, navigate to the Account Settings section of your dashboard and press the Connect button.

Your existing blogs and published posts will now be linked to your identity and sync to your Personal Data Server (PDS). You’ll be able to see sync progress and details about your connected identity directly in your dashboard.

We've integrated with pdsls to provide a direct link to view all of the records stored on your PDS.

Any changes made to the records on your PDS will be reflected on pckt.blog as well. However, if the records stored in your PDS are deleted, we will maintain a copy locally within your dashboard.

ATproto integration has been a long work in progress. We hope that these features will be as exciting to you as they are to us. In the future, we'd love to add more social features utilizing this protocol. Think subscriptions, comments, reader views, shared tags, and other social tools.

Happy New Year from @pckt.blog ☃️❄️🌨️ !

Bonus announcement:

We've re-designed our blog settings page. Find it by pressing the gear icon beside your blog's name in the dashboard, or by pressing the "Customize" button from your blog's home page.

We've cleaned up the look of this section and added support for customizable blog themes ! Choose a favorite color and play around with the settings to create a stunning and unique theme for your blog.

You'll also be able to adjust various blog settings from this section, including the option to toggle on or off the author credit line for your blog.

Hope you enjoy ! And as always, please reach out if you have any questions @pckt.blog ☃️❄️🌨️