Ernie Smith (Tedium)The independent blog has been in decline for years. It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s why you should start a blog in 2019—and host it yourself.
Ernie Smith (Nieman Lab)"Let's replace the shadows that Twitter and Facebook and Google have been on the media with some business-model fundamentals. As 2018 has shown, they've offered us a lot more heartache than it feels like they're actually worth."
Ernie, should you see this, I’d welcome you to come join a rapidly growing group of creators who have been doing almost exactly what you’ve prescribed. We’re amassing a wealth of knowledge, tools, code, and examples at Indieweb.org to help you and others on their journey to better owning and controlling their online identities in almost the exact way in which you’re talking about in your article. Both individually and together we’re trying to build web websites that allow all the functionality of the platforms, but in a way that is both easy and beautiful for everyone to manage and use. Given the outlet for your piece, I’ll also mention that there’s a specific page for IndieWeb and Journalism.
I’d invite you to join the online chat and add yourself as an example to any of the appropriate pages, including perhaps for Craft. Also feel free to discuss your future plans and ask for any help or support you’d like to see for improving your own website. Together I hope we can all make your prediction for 2019 a reality.
But what if, in 2019, we take a step back and decide not to let the platform decide how to run the show? ❧
January 09, 2019 at 07:55AM
I’ve been working on a redesign of my site recently, using a more robust CMS, and the advantages of controlling the structure of the platform soup-to-nuts are obvious, even if it requires more upfront work. ❧
January 09, 2019 at 07:57AM
2019 is the year when publishers — whether big ones like Axios or the Los Angeles Times or tiny ones like mine or Judd Legum’s Popular Information — move away from letting someone else call all the shots. Or, at least, they should. ❧
January 09, 2019 at 08:01AM
Richard MacManus (social.ricmac.org)Platforms are the key to influence in the modern era. We’ve spent years being burned by them and complaining about them for either doing too much or not enough. But what if, in 2019, we take a step back and decide not to let the platform decide how to run the show? Great points by Ernie Smith in a...
This is a golden age for indie digital media creators, who have more content creation options than ever in 2019. In fact, there are arguably too many tools to chose from. That’s why I’m going to regularly examine the tools of digital media creation here on IDM - for everything…
Marty McGuire from martymcgui.reListen to a summary of all the sessions at IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018!
Session notes: https://indieweb.org/2018/Berlin/Sessions
Narration by Marty McGuire
Edited by Aaron PareckiThis is a repost of https://aaronparecki.com/2018/11/18/7/indiewebcamp-berlin.
The sessions on Microformats, Displaying Responses, Data Ethics, Making your website work offline, and Location sound like interesting things to take deeper looks into. I particularly like the idea of separating the legal and the ethical portions completely away from each other and doing the ethical portion first and then secondly filtering that through any legal loopholes. Ideally the legal filter won’t actually be filtering anything out if the ethical is done properly, and if it does, then perhaps the legal has some issues.
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)For the past week or so, I've been getting a series of Pingbacks from a spam blog that reposts a blog post a couple times a day as a new post each time. It's up to about 220 copies of the post, each one having sent me a Pingback, and each one showing up in my reader as a notification, which also cau...
Welcome to my annual publishing predictions. I’ll start by sharing some thoughts on the state of the indie nation and then I’ll jump int...
There’s also a useful question brought up here about the idea of discovering new authors and new books. It’s a similar problem faced by websites and other online content in general. Silo’s general nature and the algorithms they can bring to bear have solved some of the discovery question (for their own enrichment). Solving this from an indie perspective isn’t just useful from the website content perspective, but it’s also very important for the book sales perspective.
I don’t have quite the crazy analysis that Jeremy Keith has done of his posts, and I initially thought that there was no way I’d posted as much as he had. Perhaps it might be worth delving deeper into the numbers to see exactly what is going on?
Possibly worse(?!), that total posting number is up from 1,762 public posts in 2017. I can only attribute the increase in quantity to the ability to increasingly easily post to my site via micropub clients and some simple bookmarklets I use in conjunction with David Shanske’s brilliant Post Kinds plugin. G-d bless the IndieWeb and its tremendously helpful community for helping me take back ownership of my digital online life. I can only imagine how much higher that number goes this coming year if I can manage to build a Microsub set up and indie reader into my website and make the entire processes even more friction-less.
I unwittingly spent a few minutes last night on cleaning up some plumbing on my back end that will make it easier to follow up (when necessary) on likes, reads, and bookmarks that I collect.
I can’t bear to go through and count the number of private posts for the year, but I will say that having my own online searchable database of things I’ve written, replied to, bookmarked, read, listened to, watched, annotated, etc. has been incredibly useful over the past few years.
Congrats! Fantastic stats. How’d you do those cool little graphs?
Indigenous is all about controlling your social experience on the internet. Using modern internet technology, you can follow websites as easily as following a person on Facebook, and Post content to your own website as easily as tweeting on Twitter. Indigenous requires you to be signed up with a server that provide Micropub or Microsub compatibility in order to use the features of Indigenous.
James King (Twitter)Started tinkering with building a feed reader again.
— Les Orchard (@lmorchard) December 28, 2018
Baffled to find that some of the feeds I subscribe to have 300-500 items in them for no good reason.
(e.g. a web comic or a news site with like the last 2-4 years worth of items listed)Have you ever considered just using Newsboat and then building a web interface on top of it for mobile reading? I have been thinking about doing that myself recently.
— James King (@elroyjetson) December 28, 2018Huh, I'd never actually heard of Newsboat until now. For a bunch of years, building a feed reader was my go-to learning project for new web dev frameworks
— Les Orchard (@lmorchard) December 28, 2018It is mostly a terminal based app, but it handles the crapy stuff like RSS and Atom parsing. Stores everything in an SQLite3 DB. You can still use it as a learning project, but not have to deal with the yuck part.
— James King (@elroyjetson) December 28, 2018
I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media. (Website, blog, mailing list, etc.) ❧
Christina Farr used to spend 5 hours a week posting and interacting with friends on Instagram. She quit cold this summer, and her life changed dramatically for the better.
Pernille Ripp (Pernille Ripp)Please change my Twitter password…
These were the words I texted my husband on November 18th as I traveled home from NCTE. Exhausted yet fulfilled, I knew my brain needed a break from the constant stream of learning that Twitter provides me with. Take a break fully in order to be more present ...
Stephen Downes (downes.ca)This is yet another example of a genre called "quit lit". It's the post someone writes when they've quit something. These days, what they're mostly likely quitting is social media like Facebook and Twitter. Both have become toxic, serving a bottomless bowl of trivial content, abuse, and advertising. And yet, until the day they quit, people keep going back. But this trend is accelerating - when I quit Facebook more than two years ago, it was unthinkable, but now it's a phenomenon that threatens the company's bottom line. How can they fix it? I'm not sure they can.
