Saturday, December 4 2021
Instagram Stories is designed as a mobile experience; hence, portrait orientation looks better than landscape-oriented photos when sharing a story.
However, I prefer sharing photos in the landscape orientation, which better captures the environment.
The "Story" format makes it easy and quick to share content mainly because I don't need to think about what to write ;-)
For this reason, I've created a new feature on the Smart Doll online store called "Stories" - it's accessible from the main menu "News" dropdown.
Smart Doll Stories will contain a higher resolution landscape-oriented version of photos I post in Instagram Stories. Smart Doll stories will have more nitty-gritty, drop hints and more from Smart Doll Land simply because I take more landscape-oriented photos. Posts before December are legacy portrait-oriented photos.
Photos will include (more importantly) lego progress builds and daily life and trips across Japan ;-)
As I write this, I think I should rename the feature to "Timeline" as it captures work and play over time for the team and me.
Photos are posted to Timeline using a communication tool called Slack. I post a photo to a channel from my phone and we use the Slack API to upload the image to Amazon S3 which is then shared by a CDN and pulled into the Smart Doll online store.
This automated process is much easier for me to share content which means I can do it more often. The team also posts project progress report photos to Slack - some of which will then show up in Timeline.
I will still share goodies on social media, but it won't be as often as the new Timeline on the Smart Doll online store.
Sharing too much on social media reduces the frequency of your content being shown to all your followers. This is because social media algorithms need to prioritize your zillions of posts against other content creators that your followers are following.
The new Timeline enables me to share more without being penalized by such algorithms ;-)
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