Websites sit on a design spectrum. On one end are applications, with their conditional logic, states, and flows—they’re software.
On the other end of the design spectrum are documents; sweet, modest documents with their pleasing knowableness and clear edges.
For better or worse, I am a document lover.
This is the context where I fell in love with design and the web. It is a love story, but it is also a ghost story.
Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren’t designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren’t run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web once was, but what it can be again.
This really hits home for me. Anil could be describing The Session here:
They often start as a labor of love from one person, or one small, tightly-knit community. The knowledge or information set that they record is considered obscure or even worthless to outsiders, until it becomes so comprehensive that its collective worth is undeniable.
This is a very important message:
Taken together, these sites are as valuable as any of the giant platforms run by the tech titans.
This gets me right in the feels.
I can’t believe I was lucky enough to contribute to 24 Ways seven times over its fifteen year lifespan!
Geocities, LiveJournal, what.cd, now Yahoo Groups. One day, Medium, Twitter, and even hosting services like GitHub Pages will be plundered then discarded when they can no longer grow or cannot find a working business model.
Considering the needs of someone who wants to make and maintain a website, without the ridiculous complexity of “modern” web tooling:
How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years? As someone studying human-computer interaction, I naturally think of the stakeholders we aren’t supporting. Right now putting up web content is optimized for either the professional web developer (who use the latest frameworks and workflows) or the non-tech savvy user (who use a platform).
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.
Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.
It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.
When people ask where to find you on the web, what do you tell them? Your personal website can be your home on the web. Or, if you don’t like to share your personal life in public, it can be more like your office. As with your home or your office, you can make it work for your own needs. Do you need a place that’s great for socialising, or somewhere to present your work? Without the constraints of somebody else’s platform, you get to choose what works for you.
A terrific piece from Laura enumerating the many ways that having your own website can empower you.
Have you already got your own website already? Fabulous! Is there anything you can do to make it easier for those who don’t have their own sites yet? Could you help a person move their site away from a big platform? Could you write a tutorial or script that provides guidance and reassurance?
I know the anxiety of sharing something with the world. I know there is a pressure to match the quality we see elsewhere on the web. But maybe we should stop trying to live up to somebody else’s standards and focus on just getting stuff out there instead. Maybe our “imperfect” things are already helpful to someone. Maybe this shouldn’t be so hard.
This looks like a nice way to get a blog up and running:
Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish. Images, text files, Word Documents, Markdown and more become blog posts automatically.
It came to my attention after writing my blog post about how we choose the web we want that the pessimism is about not being able to make a living from blogging.
Brent gives an in-depth response to this concern about not making a living from blogging. It’s well worth a read. I could try to summarise it, but I think it’s better if you read the whole thing for yourself.
You can entertain, you can have fun, you can push the boundaries of the form, if you want to. Or you can just write about cats as you develop your voice. Whatever you want!
I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment:
You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.
A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.
A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.
A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.
Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.
Max describes how he does bookmarking on his own site—he’s got a bookmarklet for sharing links, like I do. But he goes further with a smart use of the “share target” section in his web app manifest, as described by Aaron.
By the way, Max’s upcoming talk at the Web Clerks conference in Vienna sounds like it’s going to be unmissable!
Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.
Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.
I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!
Some reminiscing at a recent Homebrew Website Club prompted James to organise a Brighton bloggers meetup …ten years on from the last one!
Mark your calendar: October 21st.
While you’re making your calendar, be sure to put in the dates for Indie Web Camp Brighton: October 19th and 20th. It would be lovely see some Brighton bloggers there!
We choose whether our work stays alive on the internet. As long as we keep our hosting active, our site remains online. Compare that to social media platforms that go public one day and bankrupt the next, shutting down their app and your content along with it.
But the real truth is that as long as we’re putting our work in someone else’s hands, we forfeit our ownership over it. When we create our own website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.
I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.
I know a number of people who blog as a way to express themselves, for expression’s sake, rather than for anyone else wanting to read it. It’s a great way to have a place to “scream into the void” and share your thoughts.
Ignore the clickbaity headline and have a read of Whitney Kimball’s obituaries of Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, OpenSocial, ConnectU, Tribe.net, Path, Yik Yak, Ello, Orkut, Google+, and Vine.
I’m sure your content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is perfectly safe.