Exploring Pine.blog

I’d noticed Pine.blog before at a previous IndieWebCamp, but not had time to delve into it very deeply. Seeing some of what Brian Schrader has been working on while following IndieWebCamp Austin remotely this weekend has reminded about the project. As a result, I’ve been spending some time tonight to check out some of the functionality that it’s offering. In part, I’m curious how similar, or not, it is to what Micro.blog is offering specifically with respect to the idea of IndieWeb as a Service which I’ve recently begun documenting. It’s always great to see the growing diversity and plurality of solutions in the space.

My brief prior experience with the platform was simply adding my website to their discovery service. Tonight I’ve found that Pine.blog has got a very pretty little feed reader experience with some fun discovery functionality. You can apparently create multiple timelines to follow content, but one needs a paid account for more than one timeline. It allows both following sites as well as recommending them to others. It also appears that Brian is supporting the rel=”payment” microformat as I see at least one feed that has a “$ Support” button in the Pine.blog interface to allow me to go to the site’s payment page to support it. I think this may be one of the first times I’ve seen this functionality in an app in the wild outside of the Overcast podcast app which added it a couple of years ago.

It has webmention support, so I can “like” things within the reader and notify others. Without a paid account I don’t see the ability to reply to or mention other sites though. It also looks like it allows for import/export of OPML too, though I haven’t tried it out yet–I can only test drive so many feed readers at a time and Indigenous is taking up all of my bandwidth at present.

I do wonder a bit about potentially importing/exporting my content if I were to go all-in on Pine.blog. I’d bet the idea is on the product map, but that’s a huge bit of work to build without a paid user base to support it. I’d personally want at least an export function if I were to change over, though I’m more likely to want to dovetail my own site with it much the way I’m currently doing with Micro.blog.

It looks like it should be able to post to my website, but I’m finding the “publish” and “preview” buttons don’t work–perhaps I need a paid account for this functionality? Of course, I only see UI to provide pine.blog with my URL and my account name, but it hasn’t authenticated using a password or other method, so perhaps that portion isn’t finished? I’ll circle back around to it later when I do a free trial. I do notice that Brian, the developer of the project, has an account on pine.blog which is mirrored on one of his subdomains running WordPress. Quirkily I’ve noticed that the header on his main website changes to alternately serve the pine.blog version and the WordPress version!

More to come as I continue exploring… Later on I’ll take a look at some of their paid functionality, but for now, it’s a pretty compelling set of features and some well-laid out user interface to start. I look forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

Followed Brian Schrader (brianschrader.com)

Brian Schrader headshot

My name is Brian Schrader. I'm an independent software developer living in San Diego, CA. This site is my little home on the internet where I go on (and on) about things that are important to me.

I own and run SkyRocket Software, my indie software company, where I make things some people like. I'm also a co-founder of Adventurer's Codex, a tool for enhancing and tracking D&D games. And I'm the lead singer, song-writer, and

Separate microblog at https://microblog.brianschrader.com

Read My IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 Projects by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
I often come into an IndieWebCamp without a specific project in mind. Sometimes I will get inspired by the discussions. If not, I always have a list of things to tweak on my site; or improvements to indiebookclub, indiewebify.me, or other indieweb tools. I have recently been working on updating my p...
Read Getting Started With The IndieWeb by  Jean MacDonald Jean MacDonald (micro.welltempered.net)
What is the IndieWeb? A people-focused alternative to the “corporate web.” A place where you own and control your content. A home base from which you can syndicate and share with people on other websites, including social media. How can I participate in the IndieWeb? Get your own domain name. Th...
Some excellent work here by Jean following her session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday.

My IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 Project: The Who, What, Why, How, When, Where of IndieWeb

Yesterday, the ever-thoughtful Jean MacDonald led a conversational session at IndieWebCamp Austin on Explaining the IndieWeb (video of the session).

The session highlights one of the communities’ ongoing struggles is to help to define itself simply to a tremendously large group of people from different backgrounds and wealths of experiences. The community has build a massive Wiki of resources, tools, ideas, definitions, and brainstorming that can at times seem impenetrable to the newcomer. Simplifying and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts may be a helpful exercise.

Toward that end, as another potential entry-point to the community, I’ve created a page called IndieWeb Questions that aggregates and attempts to quickly answer the common Who, What, Why, How, When, Where questions about the IndieWeb and provide a range of low-level jumping off points to highlight further information, before attempting to provide more specific technical information.

I’d like to invite those who participated in the session yesterday, others in the community, and especially those who may be new to the community to contribute to the page or point out parts that they may find difficult to understand or confusing. If you can’t log into the wiki to do so (yet), feel free to join the chat and add your commentary there or post on your site of choice.

I’d also specifically challenge people to write essays (preferably on their own sites) about what the IndieWeb is to them, how they define it personally, and what they’d like to see in the future and post it in the Articles section of this new page. A diversity of perspectives here may be helpful in welcoming the broadest diversity of people into the community in the future.

As ever, I expect the idea of IndieWeb to mean something slightly different to everyone the same way that they’ll approach it with different technical abilities and personal preferences. Hopefully in the end, the playing field will level out for everyone and we’ll all just think of it as “using and being on the web”.

Watched IndieTrustWeb from IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 | Internet Archive

Some interesting ideas here, but I don’t feel like there are any that I could run with and want to build some concrete functionality out of. I suppose that more of my interest in this area relates to ideas about aggregation and discovery.
Watched Explaining the IndieWeb from IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 | Internet Archive

I’d love to see people who participated in this session today and who don’t have ideas for project day tomorrow, to spend 30 minutes writing down what they think the IndieWeb is now that they’ve spent some time interacting with people and thinking about what it is.

I’m also curious: what do they want it to be?

Read 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock (indieweb.org)
From Flow to Stock was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.
I’d love to see the video for this conversation once posted. The notes give a reasonable idea, but there’s a lot of discussion of silos going on here. I’m curious how those who attended might begin to own some of the ideas on their own websites in the future.

I see a lot of overlap with the ideas of commonplace books with what is going on here. Looking at the list of participants I’m not seeing any that I think might actually have both “stock” and “flow” on their personal websites yet. I feel like I’m getting ever closer to having them on mine.

Read 2020/Austin/mfmicro by IndieWeb (indieweb.org)
Learn microformats by fixing micro.blog was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.
I really want to see the video from this session once it gets posted. Building out and testing themes for various systems in the IndieWeb space is something we need to do some additional significant work on improving.

This is definitely an area I’m actively hacking in lately.

Simultaneously saving journalism and social media

As I’m reading the notes from the New Affordability session at IndieWebCamp Austin I can’t help but to think back on my old IndieWeb business hosting idea which I’ve been meaning to flesh out more fully.

What if local newspapers/magazines or other traditional local publishers ran/operated/maintained IndieWeb platforms or hubs (similar to micro.blog, Multi-site WordPress installs, or Mastodon instances) to not only publish, aggregate, curate, and disseminate their local area news, but also provided that social media service for their customers?

Reasonable mass hosting can be done for about $2/month which could be bundled in with regular subscription prices of newspapers. This would solve some of the problems that people face with social media presences on services like Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously solving the problem of newspapers and journalistic enterprises owning and managing their own distribution. It would also give a tighter coupling between journalistic enterprises and the communities they serve.

The decentralization of the process here could also serve to prevent the much larger attack surfaces that global systems like Twitter and Facebook represent from being disinformation targets for hostile governments or hate groups. Tighter community involvement could be a side benefit for local discovery, aggregation, and interaction.

Many journalistic groups are already building and/or maintaining their own websites, why not go a half-step further. Additionally many large newspaper conglomerates have recently been building their own custom CMS platforms not only for their own work, but also to sell to other smaller news organizations that may not have the time or technical expertise to manage them.

 A similar idea is that of local government doing this sort of building/hosting and Greg McVerry and I have discussed this being done by local libraries. While this is a laudable idea, I think that the alignment of benefits between customers and newspapers as well as the potential competition put into place could be a bigger beneficial benefit to all sides.

Featured photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash