Tags: indieweb

Let’s bring Fan Sites and webrings back! - bryanlrobinson.com

As the commercial viability of the web grew, we saw more and more users become consumers and not creators. Many consumers see websites as black boxes full of magic that they could never understand. Because of this, they would never think to try to create something.

This is a shame. We lost a little piece of the magic of the web when this culture came about.

A call to action to create a fan site about something you love. It would be an unmonetisable enthusiasm. But it’s still worth doing:

1. The act of creation itself is fun!
2. Sharing something you love with the world is worthwhile.
3. You’ll learn something.

So here’s the challenge:

1. Create a Fan Site.
2. Help someone create a Fan Site.
3. Create a webring.

Signal v Noise exits Medium – Signal v. Noise

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

A New Mailing List, Goodbye Instagram?, Future Book Hello Again — Roden Explorers Archive

Craig’s slow walk away from Instagram:

I want to have a place very far apart from that, where I can post photos on my own terms. Not have an algorithm decide which of my posts is best (have you noticed Instagram making the second photo in series appear first in the carousel?). And I don’t want to be rewarded for being anodyne, which is what these general algorithms seem to optimize for: things that are easily digestible, firmly on the scale of “fine, just fine.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the more boring stuff we shove into our eyeballs, the more boring our taste becomes.

We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites - Motherboard

Facebook isn’t really all that much better or more convenient than having your own website, or sending emails or chats. But for some reason, Facebook (and Instagram) are where we post now.

Oh Hello Ana - Blogging and me

A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!

When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.

Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018 - Opening Keynote - Taking Back The Web - YouTube

Here’s the talk I gave recently about indie web building blocks.

There’s fifteen minutes of Q&A starting around the 35 minute mark. People asked some great questions!

Warp and Weft — Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul was at the Material conference in Iceland too, and we had some good chats. Here, he speaks his brains with Deep Thoughts prompted by the event.

I really get where he’s coming from when he says that “certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others”, but it sure is tricky to nail down.

Stats: Creating (Phil Gyford’s website)

I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.

PushAPI without Notifications | Seblog

Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.

What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? • Robin Rendle

Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:

…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.

How to get on the #indieweb!

As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.

2018-11-03, 21:54 - sonniesedge.co.uk

Day one of Indie Web Camp Berlin is done, and it was great! Here’s Charlie’s recap of the sessions she attended.

Infovore » Pouring one out for the Boxmakers

This is a rather beautiful piece of writing by Tom (especially the William Gibson bit at the end). This got me right in the feels:

Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.

A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.

The power of self-publishing - HankChizlJaw

This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:

What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.

Weaknotes 1

I really like Alice’s updates.

I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Your “thread” should have been a blog post…

I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.

Playing with the Indieweb

A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.

Just write.

What you write might help someone understand a concept that you may think has been covered enough before. We each have our own unique perspectives and writing styles.

Yes! This!!

That voice telling you that people are just sitting somewhere watching our every step and judging us based on the popularity of our writing is a big fat pathetic attention-needing liar.

New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates - Facebook for Developers

Welp! As of today, none of my posts, links, or notes can be syndicated to Facebook:

The publish_actions permission will be deprecated. This permission granted apps access to publish posts to Facebook as the logged in user. Apps created from today onwards will not have access to this permission. Apps created before today that have been previously approved to request publish_actions can continue to do so until August 1, 2018.

If you’re reading this on Facebook: so long, it’s been good to know ya.