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James let me know that yesterday's post on RSS had hit the front page of Hacker News.

I was expecting a lot more push back on my statement that "people inventing new 'standards' are deliberately trying to make them hard" but (so far) only one comment mentions it:

This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.

I've long said that various standards are too complicated for the average person. ActivityPub is certainly beyond me and a lot of indieweb building blocks are also out of reach.

Things don't have to be so complicated.

Frank Meeuwsen asks Show me your blogroll considering them "the best artifacts of the Early World Wide Web". They certainly help with discovery of other bloggers.

I had a dedicated blogroll for a while on the old WordPress site but also a 'pseudo-blogroll' (called The Directory) automatically generated from those who sent me webmentions. The Directory was a different approach that allowed people to discover other indieweb bloggers.

I no longer have an explicit blogroll but my /reader essentially performs the same function and has an OPML file available for download. The OPML is automatically updated whenever I add/remove a feed to/from /reader.

As I always say, what better recommendation can you make than the feeds you actively read yourself.

In the spirit of the personal web and discovery, I finally got round to adding the site to the indieweb Webring. It's only taken me a few ... years 🤣

I was a bit stuck for where to put it but eventually opted for in the menu tray:

I always enjoy hitting the 'next' link on a webring and not having a clue where it will take me.

Looking back, I see a journey that has taken twists and turns and doubled back on itself.

Six years ago today I first considered building an integrated RSS reader after realising that this was the way to go a week or so before:

"my initial reaction was a combined feed reader/blogging environment"

It took me nearly five years to reach the point where I could actually build it.

I wanted a tool within which I could directly react to posts in my feeds but this only works properly if both sides support webmentions.

Yes, I can take actions in /reader and they will show as posts on the blog but the other person may never know. That's the big problem with relying solely on indieweb building blocks: scope and reach.

I recently built /updates which only shows me which feeds have new items so that I can follow links to see them in their native environment. I was unhappy with the homogeneity of seeing everything displayed according to my own style preferences.

This, obviously, put me right back to where I was before /reader – reading and responding as a multi-step, multi-system process. Maybe, with current restrictions, that is how it should be. I could add a fallback that sends pingbacks (where supported) if there is no webmention endpoint but is that the answer? ¹ I mentioned before that using /updates means I leave more comments at the original source – surely that's a good thing.

Does every response I write need to be held on my own site? No, absolutely not. Do those who read my words need to know about everything I reply to? Again, no. If I want to keep track of specific replies and/or conversations there are other ways to do so.

The idea behind an integrated reading and writing environment is still valid, even desirable, but there isn't the technological consistency to make it truly viable. Web wide interoperability is a nice goal but is it really necessary? We have come this far without it. Would requiring that everything can talk to everything else stifle innovation?

Even if I appear to repeatedly contract myself or my previous actions I will keep doing what feels right at the time. It doesn't mean it was wrong, but it also doesn't mean the new way is right. I reserve the right to change my mind, as well all should. I can only pose questions, it will take those far wiser than I to answer them.

PHP-MST has completely stolen my spare cognitive resource, creating the standalone, file-based version of /reader has taken a back seat.

I know why:

1. it's easier to build, and
2. because it is a riff on Andy's node.js app there is a social element to its development

The indieweb movement preaches scratching your own itch but it's often more fun to collaborate or do something in tandem – even if you're working on separate things the interaction between them adds extra fuel to the creative fire.

Still, once I've gotten this to the point I will share it with the world, I will be able to take certain things I've learnt back to the other project. It's productive procrastination.

Bix wrote about the idea of universally followable /now pages. This notion is a replacement for / addendum to an idea he previously had about a site or service that would show you when people have made updates to their info rather than what those updates actually were.

The key is that it would let the individual explore those updates in their own time. They are given the minimum information required rather than be overloaded.

He says:

"So that's my pitch to the /now page community: develop tools that publish these pages not just to a webpage but to RSS and/or ActivityPub, as well as tools to markup, perhaps using some kind of microformats, the underlying HTML in ways that would allow for a crawler to parse them even absent an RSS or ActivityPub feed."

Microformats2 certainly could work. There are already indieweb tools that parse pages based on markup, like monocle but RSS is far more familiar with much wider adoption. Even if people persist in saying social killed RSS or that it died with Google Reader.

Using rssCloud to push updates (I wish more feeds supported it) would be a nice addition.

This got me thinking about feed readers. They became popular because of their killer feature: convenience. They bring everything together in one place allowing the consumer to easily scan updates from multiple sources without having to navigate halfway across the web.

Feed readers also homogenise content, displaying it according to local preferences. Links will always be the same colour and other elements, like blockquotes, will always look the same. It reduces the cognitive load when consuming posts from multiple and varied sources.

But is this always a good thing?

I've written before about trying to shift away from posts just being "social units" in a timeline – that is one of the big disadvantages with certain social networks: all content is rendered the same. Also mentioned in passing before.

It makes me wonder if we're 'doing it wrong' with feed readers.

The homogenisation of post content means we lose the personality behind the words. As I have previously quoted Robin Sloan: "presentation is a form of content" – abstracting the content from how it was meant to look can do it a disservice.

I have been intrigued by the idea of having "less of an emphasis on the actual consumption itself within the reader – more of a notification system" and Bix's post brings me back to this.

The menu tray for /reader is just a list of blogs with an indication of unread posts. What if this was all it did? Just told you someone had updated their site and it was up to you, the reader, to go off and find out what.

I wondered if this approach might cause me to read less due to the loss of convenience. Conversely, it might make me interact more, leave more comments, as I would already be on the host site.

I posited an alternative view for /reader 7 months ago (wow, was it really that long) but nothing ever came of it. Now, however, I think the time is right to return to it and see what I can come up with.

Something seems to be coalescing across the web. Strands are coming from different areas and angles but meeting in the middle. I'm talking about the idea of a single timeline – and that doesn't mean just using one social network.

Dave Winer wrote:

One timeline for each user. Lots of choice, but one timeline. And there has to be a basic agreement on what goes in that timeline. What are the elements of a message. A way to define more types, without going to a standards body, which always crush the individual in favor of the bigco's. Something minimal, orderly, easy to document, lots of example code.

Craig Hockenberry, from The Iconfactory, said something similar:

One thing I've noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we've known for years. That's an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard (ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you'd want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone's Micro.blog, or maybe another person's Tumblr, or someone else's photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline.

The current buzz is around ActivityPub (and its poster child, Mastodon) but it doesn't have to be based on this; any way for systems to talk to each other and get information from point A to points B, C, D... Write once, broadcast to many, whatever they are using. Conversely, you need to be able to get stuff from B, C & D all fed back to A – again, no matter what everyone is using. Like blog posts in a feed reader. I've always said that I like micro.blog because it acts as a social feed reader rather than just a siloed network.

I've taken a look at ActivityPub on a couple of occasions and found it far too confusing to even consider implementing it. As much as I like the indieweb ideals a lot of them are also beyond me.

Dave has been reiterating how RSS is a way of moving data around the web and that current uses are too narrow-focused. It's great for subscribing to blogs and podcasts but could be used for so much more with a bit of vision.

I was curious, therefore, to see Andy Sylvester mention he was working on something with the working title "MyStatusTool" – a Twitter like interface powered by RSS and using rssCloud to get everything updated. He may be starting with "a text box to enter a short post" but the potential applications are so much wider.

One to watch.

Like Am I on the indieweb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne...

I'm an experienced web developer, and I can figure it out. But the steps aren't simple, and most of my friends are not web developers. So, to me, this all feels like the prototype of an idea – a proof of concept.

...

What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place.

It's a shame that we're still talking about this in these terms. Yes, there are more implementations out there and libraries you can use in your own code but it's still too hard for most people.

But it's not just a code & complexity issue. For the indieweb to grow people need to be convinced of the benefits of running their own site and owning their own data – an almost herculean task when faced with the size, simplicity and convenience of the centralised social platforms.

The world and web have moved on.

Blogging through time

While I have been active on the internet in one form or another since 1993 ¹ I got 'online' properly in 1995 and spent a lot of time in various forums or on ICQ and IRC. In the late 90's I started noticing blogs and became a frequent reader and commenter. By 2003 I decided it was time to have my own blog. As I was working in outsourced support for Microsoft UK at the time it seemed natural that my first blog was a mixture of personal updates and what I was learning about various Microsoft technologies.

Kev Quirk recently gave a design history of his blog prompting others to do the same, so here's mine.

2003 – Now this is how it started

Through my job I had full access to an MSDN account and had been looking at various Microsoft server products. It was, therefore, no real surprise that my first blog was built on SharePoint. That's right, SharePoint! It wasn't designed for it, required a lot of tweaking and custom code but it worked... Mostly. In June 2003 I first registered the domain randomelements.me.uk and launched a blog using SharePoint Portal Server.

The first capture on the Internet Archive is, sadly, from 10th March 2004 but the look hadn't change much since launch.

I had a static IP from my ISP at the time so was self-hosting this and an Exchange Server on a machine in my dining room.

SharePoint wasn't supposed to be a blogging platform and a lot of customisations had to be made to make it viable. RSS feeds were not supported out of the box but a clever chap called Sig Weber created an add-on that generated feeds for SharePoint lists. I also took and rebuilt an open-source ASP forum, integrating it into the site using iframes. The forum doubled as the mechanism for making comments using some SQL tricks.

2006 – One SharePoint to another

In 2006 I switched from SharePoint Portal Server to Windows SharePoint Services v3. Things were more streamlined with WSS and the site looked more like a blog than before. There was now an RSS feed for comments as well as posts, and even a mobile view using WAP.

Changing sidebar widgets aside, that's how things remained for almost the next two years. Over time I became disillusioned with SharePoint. While I had managed to make it a reasonably functioning system I'd reached the limits of what it was capable of. I had mostly switched my blogging focus to social media and was looking for better integration with the social web. My wife had been trying to get me to use WordPress for a while and I finally succumbed.

2008 – Welcome WordPress

While I had been essentially microblogging since 2003, with the occasional longer post, the change saw me try to be a citizen journalist. I fell into the trap of writing mainly essay style posts and wanted a theme that would look more like a news portal, emulating the tech blogs rather than a personal blog. By complete contrast I decided to change to a personal domain and registered colinwalker.me.uk.

Gone was the blue of SharePoint in favour of red and black, multiple columns and 'read more' links. In retrospect it's not something I'm overly proud of but I was trying to be something I wasn't. I took the first of numerous blogging breaks in 2009 and the domain redirected to a wordpress.com version which may be why the Internet Archive again failed to properly capture the site until October 2010.

2011 – Rebrand

Towards the end of 2011 I rebranded the blog to 'Social Thoughts' instead of just my name but, in the short term, not much else changed. Over the next few months I slowly simplified things and the site evolved. I cut out a column and made it lot lighter, more whitespace; the red stayed but was dialled back a bit.

In keeping with the name I had also decided to re-include shorter posts or 'thoughts' as I would call them to match the site name. I had been running a separate 'blogette' on Posterous called 'Colin's Thoughts' which focused on shorter, quicker, less essay style posts and it seemed a good opportunity to combine the two.

I was heavily active on Google+ which prompted a number of design choices like the inclusion of G+ comment sections and direct links to subscribe in Google Currents while it was still a news reader app before becoming the rebranded Google+ for business.

2012 – Stripping it back

By the end of 2012 I had continued cutting back and embraced a more minimal approach. I think I had realised the previous error of my ways.

The site had been cut back to a single column with no sidebar. Links were still red but the site was otherwise monochrome with a lot of whitespace, things felt much more airy. Posts were mainly essays with the 'thoughts' becoming less frequent. I was becoming jaded with constantly striving for perfection on the blog and switched full time to Google+ in November 2013.

2016 – Blogging back better

By the end of 2015 I had stopped writing on Google+ as a number of changes, and a shift in the community, made me realise it couldn't really replace your own site, but I still wasn't quite ready to return to the blog. It took until March 2016 for me to reboot the site. The first capture in April illustrates a shift in design to go with a shift in content. I wanted to write a lot less about social media due to an increasing frustration with life on social networks.

I made a deliberate decision to become even more minimal and move to grey scale, the red had finally gone along with the 'read more' links, full posts on the home page was the way to go instead of having to click through.

There was, again, a period of gradual evolution. A few months later saw the change to the blue/grey colour for links - completely monochrome wasn't working but I didn't want too much colour. The default link colour in (most) web browsers is blue so I wanted to reflect that but remain more muted.

Strangely, a couple of months later I had reverted to the grey and reintroduced the 'read more' links along with social buttons. What was I thinking? I was more active on Medium and had outsourced comments there, disabling native WordPress comments to avoid having to deal with spam. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

2017 – Big changes

In January 2017 I stumbled across the kickstarter for micro.blog. Having stopped using Twitter in December 2016 this piqued my interest and in February I started prepping the blog to better integrate with the service and provide a better venue for hosting my own microblog posts. This also had a big impact on the way I posted – I returned to how things were from 2003 - 2008 with predominantly short, micro posts and the occasional longer effort.

Around this time I also switched to the colinwalker.blog domain

The first half of 2017 was a period of massive change. I originally felt that the microblog should be separated from longer posts but relented when it seemed counter-intuitive to do so. Threads and themes would go between long and short posts so it became hard for people to follow along if only following one RSS feed.

Micro posts integrated with longer items as seen here.

Some of the more familiar design elements from later iterations of the site started to creep in such as the the little icon to show if there were comments on posts. Visually, it was another case of gradual evolution; technologically it was taking huge leaps as I began integrating indieweb elements and plugins into my theme and WordPress.

In June 2017, inspired by Dave Winer's Scripting News, I made what was probably the most fundamental change to the site which has defined how it looks and works ever since. I changed the homepage of the blog to a "Today" page with posts in chronological order. You would start the day at the top and read down in time order – top to bottom just like reading a book. If there were no posts for that day it would say so and list the 5 most recent posts. There are no working captures on the Internet Archive for this period but the below shows how it looked on mobile:

I was initially worried about the change as people are so used to reverse-chron but it stuck and I have kept with it ever since. The rest of the year saw me refining the design, permanently reintroducing the blue/grey for links. I had toyed with trying different colours to make them stand out more (especially when using my phone in greyscale) but decided the blue was best.

2018 – Rebrand and revert

By April 2018 I reverted to calling the blog by my name rather than the 'Social Thoughts' moniker which no longer fit my approach. The option of a dark mode had appeared by way of clicking a dot at the top right of the page.

By July 2018, after going on holiday and being largely disconnected, I decided that I needed to step away from online life for a while – cue another blogging break. On my return in 2019 I started further simplifying, reducing, decluttering. Here's a capture from May 2020 (again, captures are very spotty.)

Over time the 'Today' page had moved to a "blank slate" metaphor; I stopped linking to previous posts so if there were none that day there would literally be nothing to see, each day a blank slate, a fresh start. The blog had hit peak minimal. Each day became a single post that I would continue to edit throughout the day and divide into sections. To start a new section I would type two ampersands which would get converted to a linkable hash at display time. I created a custom RSS feed that would take each section and present it as a separate item but recommended people used the Daily Feed to catch up with everything in one go, top down like on blog.

November 2020 also saw the birth of The Garden, my own digital garden/wiki style repository where I could store things that weren't posts. Each item was a WordPress page within a hierarchical structure (parents, children, grandchildren) and I could use typical wiki markup (double square brackets) to link between pages.

2021 - (b)log-In

Although I saw it as my ideal setup, the new mechanism lasted for just over a month. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with WordPress feeling it too heavy for what I was doing so looked at building a new version of the Today page that was straight up PHP, no WordPress. It pulled the posts from the same database but was considerably more lightweight. I realised I wanted to turn it into a fully self-contained system so built one – it was launched on the 6th Jan 2021.

I emulated the theme and layout from my custom templates in the WordPress version of the blog; I liked the look that had evolved and wanted to retain it.

Each instance of the blog has had an ongoing process of evolution. From 2008 to 2016 it was the same WordPress theme just constantly reduced and butchered. 2016 to 2021 was my custom version of Automattic's old Minnow theme reduced to one column and tweaked. (b)log-In continues to benefit/suffer from this process - constant tweaks, borrowing bits from other people and integrating them in a way that feels natural to the site, it's all a remix.

Ups and downs

It's been fun taking a walk down memory lane but a little cringeworthy at times thinking back to some of the decisions I made or, rather, why I made them. Thanks to Kev for the prompt.

There have been a lot of ups and downs over the years with a number of breaks from blogging, both completely and by switching to write elsewhere (Google+ and Medium) but I have always come home. I sometimes regret writing away from the blog but remember that I needed to shake things up. If I hadn't, the possibility is that I might have stopped blogging completely and not returned from one of my breaks.

Things will, no doubt, continue to morph and develop over time (the recent additions of the 'Start Here' page and feed reader are testament to that) and it will be a fun experiment to see how they have changed in another 19 years, presuming blogging is still a thing.

---

1. first sharing music samples on a Usenet board over a 2800 baud modem – speedy! ↩

Ok Malik writes that he tries to "to turn back the clock and blog as if it was 2001." Quoting Jane Friedman, from her newsletter, he points out that blogging has changed:

"Instead, for blogging: Think about the potential value and longevity of the content ... If you have little or no consistency in what you're writing, it's difficult to create impressions or opportunities around the work you want to be known for–or earn a living from."

Why?

When did it become the norm that a blog is a marketing tool? What's wrong with simply using a blog as a way of airing your thoughts and feelings?

Blogging itself is still as it always was, it can be used as one sees fit without feeling constrained by the expectations of others. Blogs are, or can still be, personal endeavours, the value and longevity of which should be defined solely by the author.

Om mentions he has plans for the future that include "conversations and sociability" and I feel that blogs can still play a part here. The problem is that most people have been conditioned to default to social channels because they are easier to update and respond to. Maybe blogging needs an overhaul (I've tried to streamline my own processes as much as possible) especially with the social aspect. indieweb features aim to improve the connectivity between sites but are still too complicated for the average person to implement so something needs to happen – either a gross simplification of how things work or a rethink of the direction we're heading.

There has been a tendency to move towards smaller, more private forums but blogging can and should still play a part; it's down to how we approach them and how we can develop or enhance the tools. Something that's way beyond my pay grade but, in his book Indie Microblogging, Manton Reece explains it nicely:

What we don't want to do is reinvent the wheel with a new social media-like protocol that isn't rooted in the web and blogs. Others have tried to come up with new systems for microblogging that don't use blogs. But the word “blog” is part of “microblog” for a reason. They differ only in length. By using blogs, we get to keep everything that is valuable about blogging. We get to keep existing blog software and indieweb-friendly formats.

My indie, integrated feed reader

For a few years now, it has been a goal (or more of a dream) to build my own feed reader which integrates directly with the blog making it easy to perform indieweb actions such as likes and replies. I started building a WordPress plugin back in 2018 but quickly abandoned it as I didn't have the coding skills necessary at the time.

Today I am officially unveiling /reader, my new indie, integrated feed reader.

Before getting to the details I wanted to say that this has been made possible thanks to this RSS & Atom parser by David Grudl, it took a lot of the grunt work out of the equation meaning I could focus on the important bits.

Down to business

Reader adopts the visual style from the blog and my notes page displaying items as 'cards' in a river of news – oldest first. It can show all items, per feed or the last 24 hours.

New feeds can be added individually or imported from an (uploaded) OPML file. When added, the posts for that feed will be automatically pulled in. A cron job polls for new items every 30 minutes checking the last time the feed was updated to see if it needs to grab new items. That date is then written to the database for the next time it checks.

I'm currently storing a rolling three months of items but may reduce this to keep the table size down. When polling for posts it compares the timestamp (e.g. pubDate or updated) against 'now minus three months' and ignores anything older. New items are pulled into the database and those older than three months are deleted.

I can trigger a manual update at any time via a 'refresh' icon which triggers an async action to poll feeds in the background. The feed list (which slides out from the left) shows which feeds have unread items.

Indie and Integrated

So, why go to all the trouble of building my own feed reader? The main reason is integration with the blog. It's also another aspect of my online life that I can bring into my own control.

In addition to 'mark as read' each 'card' has actions which allow me to post directly to the blog and send webmentions. I can like, reply to or bookmark a post and the relevant Webmention will be sent.

Tapping each of these actions brings up a form populated with the post URL and the 'content filter' to add the required markup. I can then add some comments or my reply and post that straight to the blog.

I can 'mark all as read' which does as it suggests unless viewing a single feed when only items for that feed are marked.

Public/Private

The /reader page is publicly available but all admin and post actions are gated behind login checks. Anyone is welcome to come and have a look at what feeds are listed – the posts visible will reflect my read/unread status.

I am considering adding the ability for anyone to download an OPML export of the feeds list should they want. I might also add an option to 'suggest a feed' where visitors can let me know of a site they think I should be subscribed to.

v1.0

This is a version 1.0 feature that likely has bugs and needs tidying up or refining so it will likely change as I use it more and come up against issues or frustrations. I've already thought of one thing I want to add while typing this.

It doesn't support JSON feed but someone submitted a PR to include this in the library so I may look at implementing that in future.

Here's a short video of /reader in action.

I decided to add a humans.txt file to the site. They've been around for quite a while now and seem to have gone a little quiet, even the official website no longer seems to exist, but I thought it was something worth adding.

The indieweb has rel="me" for identity consolidation (linking different web properties to the same person) but the humans.txt file is just a simple indication of who created/authored/is involved in a website.

For humans, about humans.

From pretty humble beginnings, (b)log-In has become quite a complex system. When I set out to build it, I wanted something simple and lightweight that wasn't bogged down by features and architecture that weren't needed.

I sometimes worry that, as I add more features, it is becoming what I didn't want it to be, that it is getting too heavy and cluttered. But then I step back and reassess everything. None of the features stop me from hitting the plus icon, typing something and tapping 'post' – no matter what else I've added, the core function is still as clean and simple as when I started, maybe even cleaner since making a number of changes.

(b)log-In is designed to get words on the web as quickly and easily as possible; it achieves that goal and far more. The bells and whistles may not be strictly required but add a host of quality of life improvements which enhance the experience.

I still have to pinch myself sometimes as I can't quite believe that this is something I have made. I may be using some third party libraries but I am still amazed that I got it all working, especially the webmention endpoint. On reflection, however, much of my trepidation was down to a fear of the unknown, of looking at something as a complex whole. When breaking things down into manageable chunks what seemed impenetrable actually became relatively simple.

I couldn't have done it all on my own but didn't have to; being able to build on the work of others and not have to reinvent multiple wheels was liberating and allowed me to tackle features that would have been completely out of reach. Still, that's what open source is all about and I am indebted to the indieweb and wider developer communities for that.

Things have come a long way since I started this journey at the beginning of the year and I've learned so much and am so proud of what I've been able to accomplish in that time. The code isn't as refined as it could be, downright ugly in places, but it works and that's all I really care about.

In reply to: Why Do I Write? | Excursions...

I've written about this a number of times over the years and the crux of it is I just feel the need. Writing is part of me, part of who I am, part of my identity. The translation of thought to word is a powerful thing in any format. Blogging can be immediate, visceral, a direct path from mind to page.

If I step away, I am inexorably drawn back to it, an emptiness grows inside me that only writing in some form can fill.it may take weeks, months, even years, but the call is always there.

While I predominantly write for self (whatever that really means) it is inevitable that I will consider others; it is unavoidable in a social medium such as blogging, especially in an indieweb environment built upon the interaction and interrelation of individual sites.

I write to communicate with myself as much as with others, to flesh out my ideas, to aid in the thinking process. But I also write to document my thoughts and actions so that future me might remember or be able to build upon them.

Happy Friday!

I think now is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of this from the introduction to the Cluetrain Manifesto:

What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales?

In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass "culture," and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Although I'm still not sure that 'atavistic' is the right word. It's used to emphasise the context created by 'prehistoric' but implies primitiveness when nothing could be further from the truth. Humanity's fascination with telling tales is an innate part of who we are and always will be.

Still, history repeats itself. The internet was seen as an alternative to the homogenised media and bureaucratic organisations but our modern-day versions have largely taken over. Hence the need for the indieweb, in whatever form you imagine it, to again redress the balance and reconnect people to each other directly rather than through the distorting lenses of the gatekeepers.

Those very gatekeepers, somewhat ironically, began life as services designed to connect, but money and scope and power have distorted their mission.

Liked: On the indie web... again – Manu...

Manu is spot on:

"The more I think and write about tech, the more I'm convinced that the tech doesn't really matter all that much without the correct mindset ... If people are not having more interesting and profound interactions online, it is not for lack of tools. It's for lack of good intentions."

As I have said for a while, having your own site creates (or, at least should create) a stronger moral responsibility for your words and actions – that is a big part of what the indieweb can promote.

Liked: ⛰️Tanzawa is Public 🎉 - ⛰️ James Van Dyne...

Congratulations to James on making his blog engine, Tanzawa, publicly available – built for the indieweb with sustainability in mind. Awesome work! 👍

Liked: dianoetic...

"IndieWeb isn't about getting Webmentions working, or being able to post to your blog from an app on your phone (as happy as it makes me to be able to do so). The technology is fascinating, but if you're focused on the technology, you're missing the point."

Congratulations to James for migrating his blog to Tanzawa, his indieweb native custom CMS. He has implemented some next level shit in getting to this point including writing his own importers for WordPress content – way beyond my ken!

When I moved the journal to (b)log-In I used a plugin to export entries to a CSV file which I edited in Excel before importing straight into the MySQL database. Just date and content – nothing fancy. WordPress exports are big and messy with all sorts of metadata and I really wouldn't want to deal with all of that which is why WordPress will be sticking around for my archive.

In reply to: indieweb Events...

I'm definitely interested in this discussion about the future of webmentions. Although I found it easier than expected to implement my own endpoint, once I dove into the spec, I am still of the opinion that things need to be much easier to implement.

I am reliant on a couple of PHP libraries and what I have cobbled together likely isn't terribly robust so, if the desire is for more people to use webmentions without resorting to the webmention.io service, then there needs to be a better way. What that is I can't say.

I don't know if I'll be able to attend the discussion, or if I'll be able to have any meaningful contribution, but believe webmentions are a fundamental building block of constructing a better web that is not in thrall to the large social media organisations.

Liked: two quotations on technological impermanence (plus commentary) – Snakes and Ladders...

In one way or another we are all renting our space on the internet – a very different prospect from the indieweb ideal of owning your work.

Inspired by James' work on Tanzawa I decided to include avatars for webmentions. It's something I've been on the fence about for a while but have finally opted to include.

It helps to break up the block of text made by multiple comments and is in keeping with the indieweb and social landscapes.

If no avatar is found then a circle with the first letter of the given name will be displayed.

I've still got to add an <object> tag to display a default icon if the found image URL no longer works and then make some dark mode adjustments but it's nearly there.

Note: Yes, I'm going to remove the duplicate mention. I spoofed it for testing.

In reply to: ⛰️Tanzawa...

For example a "like" doesn't necessarily have an author name, just a url. Or even no author at all. How do I display these? Do I just not display them?

All pages sending webmentions should include author details, if they don't then the site's microformats aren't correctly set up. The liked URL should be marked with 'u-like-of' by the sender and detected as 'like-of' when checking them.

If they are detected as a like but with no other details perhaps a counter could be used but I personally wouldn't display them as it is getting away from the cross-site communication ideal of the indieweb.