Tag: IndieWeb

Read IndieWeb and Webmentions by Chris Coyier (CSS-Tricks)
The IndieWeb is a thing! They've got a conference coming up and everything. The New Yorker is even writing about it:

Om Malik writes about a renewed focus on his own blog:
“My first decree was to eschew any and all analytics. I don’t want to be driven by “views,” or what Google deems worthy of rank. I write what pleases me, not some algorithm. Walking away from quantification of my creativity was an act of taking back control. ❧

I love this quote.
Annotated on March 30, 2020 at 10:49AM

What I dwell on the most regarding syndication is the Twitter stuff. I look back at the analytics on this site at the end of every year and look at where the traffic came from — every year, Twitter is a teeny-weeny itty-bitty slice of the pie. Measuring traffic alone, that’s nowhere near the amount of effort we put into making the stuff we’re tweeting there. I always rationalize it to myself in other ways. I feel like Twitter is one of the major ways I stay updated with the industry and it’s a major source of ideas for articles. ❧

So it sounds like Twitter isn’t driving traffic to his website, but it is providing ideas and news.

Given this I would syndicate content to Twitter as easily and quickly as possible, use webmentions to deal with the interactions and then just use the Twitter timeline for reading and consuming and nothing else.

Annotated on March 30, 2020 at 10:51AM

Read Show HN: Fraidycat (fraidyc.at) (Hacker News)
So I built this - and its initial purpose was just to help me keep up on public TiddlyWikis (like philosopher.life) that I had discovered. But I couldn't get myself to rip off other news readers - I've not been satisfied with RSS and I disliked Google Reader. I didn't like that it basically created a second read-only email inbox - where I'm supposed to look through every message. And I didn't like that I lost the formatting and styling of the original hypertext. I much preferred just surfing my favorite sites periodically. As I began to add blogs, Twitter, YouTube support - it felt like I was connecting the whole Web, as if it was all one network, almost as if I viewed it like the government does. (Equipped with my own personal XKeyscore Lite.) I had felt isolated before - unable to see past whatever was being recommended to me on Twitter - but now I had a tool that forced me to rouse my dormant research skills. The task of reading, writing, publishing and hunting on the Web is a formidable one - and we're far from mastering it. It's no wonder that we abdicated to social networks that attempt to do it all for us. So yeah - Fraidycat is a very small attempt to move toward tools that give us some power. It really only adds the ability to assign "importance" to someone you are following - allowing you to track them without needing to be aware of them every second. But hey - it's four months old - I think it's a good start and hopefully others here can be encouraged by it to work on tools for the World-Wide Web again.
Read The master tapes by Robin Sloan (Robin Sloan)
“What do I miss” is the wrong question, because the feeling isn’t an absence, but a presence.

If running your own website is like operating a nuclear reactor, then, yes: let’s give up on that. But what if it’s more like cooking dinner at home? That’s an activity that many people find challenging and/or intimidating, one with all sorts of social and economic ~encumbrances~, but even so, who would argue that it’s inappropriate to hope more people might learn to cook for themselves?
Maybe, after everything, we’ve actually ended up in a healthy place. Maybe the great gluey Katamari ball of technology has served us well. In 2020, you can, using nothing but the free app provided by Instagram, publish something very close to a multimedia magazine. Or, sitting at your laptop, you can produce a lightning-fast website all by yourself, every line of code calibrated just so, and host its files at a domain of your choosing. Or! You can do something in between, using a service like WordPress or Squarespace. This is not a bad range of options! ❧

There’s something between the lines here that feels like it’s closer to what the idea of IndieWeb Generations should really become. Perhaps it’s the case that when even a small handful of larger competitors like micro.blog exist it will force the larger corporate silos to come into line (they’ll lose out on market share and need to offer better service) and be more IndieWeb-like over time?
Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:34PM

Whether their scenario is a historical reenactment (albeit with higher-res images) or a seductive counterfactual, I don’t know. Whether it “matters,” I don’t know. I do know that I am enjoying my fraidy-follows, their slow pulse—people really are blogging, doing the dang thing—and the feeling of an old instinct waking up. ❧

Annotated on March 21, 2020 at 11:36PM

Watched How I Make my Website & My Thinking Behind It: TiddlyWiki NodeJS, Wikis, and Internal Linking by Brandon Hall Brandon Hall from YouTube

This is how I edit and update my website and how I think about the way I've been structuring the website . The main tools that I use for this are TiddlyWiki NodeJS, any modern web browser, simple command line scripts, and FileZilla. Links to these are below.

Also on PeerTube at https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos...

This is really awesome. Brandon is using a private TiddlyWiki to generate a static website! This is so very IndieWeb. If he’s available, he should come to the next Homebrew Website Club for San Diego or the online West Coast version.
Bookmarked Old Fashioned by Tom MacWrightTom MacWright (oldfashioned.tech)

This is a website that I made about cocktails. I'm not a huge cocktail nerd (drinking is bad, probably), but think that they're cool. And the world's pretty bad right now and making this has been calming.

It gave me a chance to both tinker with technology I usually don't use (Elm), and explore some of the cool properties of cocktails: notably that they're pretty similar and have standardized ingredients, so they can be described in relationship to each other.

So some of it might seem funky. By default, the list is sorted by 'feasibility': as you add ingredients that you have, it'll put recipes that you can make (or barely make) closer to the top. Also, click on 'Grid' for a wacky adjacency grid of cocktails and their ingredients.

Also, for vim fans, there’s j & k support.

IndieWeb for trying times!

hat tip:

Liked a tweet by Jack Wellborn (Twitter)
This is also true of IndieWeb, but the cost right now is one’s time more than it is financial cost. 
Liked IndieWebCamp London - Indie Webmention! by Cheuk Ting Ho (cheuk.dev)
I would like to add webmention to my blog. And I am testing it out now! Why you should own your content? Because we have full control of our appearance and interaction with people on the internet: No more losing content due to closing of websites No more privacy issues, no more hidden tracking Cause...
Read What’s next for Listen Notes? (Listen Notes)
The very first official Listen Notes blog post! We used to have a mini-roadmap :)

I don’t want to build yet another Podcast player app. I don’t want to trap listeners to Listen Notes. You come to Listen Notes and find the Podcasts or Podcast Episodes that you want to listen, then you leave Listen Notes to use your favorite Podcast player app to listen.
Under this principle, Listen Notes shows RSS & brings traffic back to official websites of Podcasts. Many Podcast-related sites don’t show RSS, because they want to build a walled garden to make visitors stay there as long as possible. ❧

Annotated on March 12, 2020 at 08:51AM

Read a post by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
I just pushed the first set of improvements to Parse This to support JSON-LD.  Parse This takes an incoming URL and converts  it to mf2 or jf2. It is used by Post Kinds and by Yarns Microsub  to handle this. So, assuming the default arguments are set, the parser will, for a URL that is not a feed...
Also, installed and looks good!
Read Intentional Internet by Desirée GarcíaDesirée García (Miscelanea)

So this year I took a systems design approach to the problem. Why wasn’t I doing the things I wanted to do? At first glance, it looked like a simple matter of spending too much time online.

I was, but a lot of my goals, like re-building my website or blogging again, were dependent on the Internet. So instead, I started observing the situations I would find myself in when I self-sabotaged at home and at work, and they all had too much content. Quality content by most people’s standards, but trivial, nonetheless. They were all click-holes. From there I looked at the interaction models and behaviors encouraged by those sites or platforms, and decided to experiment with removing all triggers, digitial or otherwise. The idea was that by “controlling” for these variables, perhaps I would see some sort of change at the end that would give me the space to do the things I really wanted to do and get shit done.

And so The Year of Intentional Internet began.

After reading just a few posts by Desirée García, I’d like to nominate her to give a keynote at the upcoming IndieWeb Summit in June. I totally want to hear her give a talk on The Year of Intentional Internet.

Read Letting Go of the Old Web by Desirée GarcíaDesirée García (Miscelanea)
Last year I wrote a thing on Automattic’s design blog about something I keep noodling on, which ultimately boils down to what makes us creative. What gets us to build a website? What the hell is a website today?
I don’t mean “Us” the web community, or tech industry. I mean “Us” as Humankind.

Silly me, I didn’t manage to keep a reference for where I found this article in the first place.

But it is important and has some interesting philosophical questions for the IndieWeb and, for lack of a better framing, future generations of the IndieWeb.

While I have the sort of love and excitement for the web that she talks about, I wonder if others will too?

The other side of me says that one of the great benefits of what the IndieWeb is doing is breaking down all of the larger and complicated pieces of a website down into smaller and simpler component parts. This allows a broader range of people to see and understand them and then potentially remix them into tools that will not only work for them on a day-to-day basis, but to create new and exciting things out of them. I feel like we’re getting closer to this sort of utopia, but even as I see the pieces getting simpler, I also see large projects like WordPress becoming even more difficult and complex to navigate. There is a broader divide between the general public and the professional web developer and not as many people like me who know just enough of both to be dangerous, creative, and yet still productive.

I hope we can continue to break things down to make them easier for everyone to not only use, but to create new and inspiring things.

Replied to a thread by Carter Rabasa and Boris Mann (Twitter)

Another great option is Kevin Marks‘ NoterLive which lets you Tweetstorm away and cut/paste (PESOS) the stream to your website (with appropriate mark up when done). Other ideas at: https://indieweb.org/tweetstorm

Read My Repo, My House, My Rules by Eran HammerEran Hammer (hueniverse.com)
GitHub provides an invaluable hosting service. Like all hosting platforms, any interaction between the content owner — the maintainer — and their community— the users — is owned exclusively by the owner. If you visit my repositories on GitHub, you are visiting my property, hosted generously by GitHub. It is not public space.
I wonder if the reframing by the IndieWeb community of hosting things on their own sites will prevent this sort of rudeness in the future, or will the social construct fall down with the influence of spammers and trolls?
Replied to a tweet by Lucas GonzeLucas Gonze (Twitter)

Refbacks were almost all noise and very little signal for me. Pingbacks/Trackback look dreadful and aren’t well supported anymore, so I don’t receive many. Webmentions have been AWESOME and just required two simple plugins for WordPress. My very small personal site has gotten over 6,000 reactions/replies in the past year (with the help of backfeed, particularly from Brid.gy.)

The real win is that I can use my own website to converse with others and don’t need the big social silos the way I did several years ago.