Tags: personal

Web UI Engineering Book - toheeb.com

I like the way this work-in-progress is organised—it’s both a book and a personal website that’ll grow over time.

Take Care of Your Blog

Blog!

Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in.

Excellent advice from Robin:

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.

A Well-Known Links Resource - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I really like this experiment that Jim is conducting on his own site. I might try to replicate it sometime!

This is what you’re nostalgic for - The History of the Web

❤️

I believe we aren’t nostalgic for the technology, or the aesthetic, or even the open web ethos. What we’re nostalgic for is a time when outsiders were given a chance to do something fun, off to the side and left alone, because mainstream culture had no idea what the hell to do with this thing that was right in front of it.

Just hit publish | Marco Heine - Freelance Web Developer

I have days were I can write a well researched blog post in a few hours. And I have days were I don’t feel like writing. Or I want to add one more thing but don’t know how to speak my mind. So this is a reminder to myself: just hit publish.

The week the open web won – Hi, I’m Heather Burns

So to me, this blog represents the original promise of the open web.

The one that’s here, and still is here, and always has been here, and is available to you.

Right now.

The one where you can speak the truths that you believe without the permission, or the editorial control, or the power dynamics, of anyone claiming to hold authority over you; or, perhaps, anyone keen to impose it.

Heather takes a break from her relentless crusading in favour of users against the idiocy of the UK government and reflects on the joy of doing it all from her own personal website.

And perhaps you should too, on your own blog, owned on your own hosting space, using your own words, and speaking your own truth. That sounds like a good little weekend project, don’t you think?

The Message Behind the Medium of a Personal Blog - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

• Each voice is individual and matters
• Slow is ok
• Diversified and independent is good
• Not fitting a pattern is ok
• Not being easily commodified is ok

Just Put Stuff Out There · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I’m honoured to mentioned in the same paragraph as Seth Godin and Chris Coyier (and I too have really been enjoying Chris’s writing).

Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Miriam has a wishlist for scaling up the indie web approach:

What I would like to see is a tool that helps bring the entire system together in one place. Somewhere that non-technical people can:

• build their own site, with support for feeds/mentions
• see what feeds are available on other sites, and subscribe to them
• easily respond to other sites, and see the resulting threads

(Oh, and by linking to this post, this should show up as a bookmark—I’m also testing Miriam’s webmention setup.)

Changing with the times · Chris Burnell

I think, with the sheer volume of functionality available to us nowadays on the front-end, it can be easy to forget how powerful and strong the functionality is that we get right off shelf with HTML. Yes, you read that right, functionality.

I’m not a goblin, I just play one in Google Docs (Interconnected)

We’re all LARPing on LinkedIn.

Why blog? – Chuck Grimmett

Platforms come and go. Buy a domain and set up a permanent space on the web where others to find you and link back to. I have no idea what I put on Myspace back in the day, but everything I’ve published on this site since 2008 is still accessible and the links still work.

A personal website is a digital homestead that you can improve, tinker with, and live in for years to come. It is a home for your thoughts, musings, opinions, trials, and happenings, built in a way that suits you.

I like this little prompt:

What do you wish you had found via Google today but didn’t? Write that.

Increasing the surface area of blogging

RSS is kind of an invisible technology. People call RSS dead because you can’t see it. There’s no feed, no login, no analytics. RSS feels subsurface.

But I believe we’re living in a golden age of RSS. Blogging is booming. My feed reader has 280 feeds in it.

RSS - Chris Coyier

How is all this social? It’s just slow social. If you want to respond to me, publish something linking to what I said. If I want to respond to you, I publish something linking to what you wrote. Old school. Good school. It’s high-effort, but I think the required effort is a positive thing for a social network. Forces you to think more.

A Web Renaissance

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.

Smart analysis from Anil, though I’m not sure I’d agree with his emphasis on tools and frameworks—it’s the technology built into browsers that has really come along in leaps and bounds, allowing people to do more with less code.

But then there’s this:

So if we have the tech, then why hasn’t it happened already? The biggest thing that may be missing is just awareness of the modern web’s potential. Unlike the Facebooks and Googles of the world, the open, creative web doesn’t have a billion-dollar budget for promoting itself. Years of control from the tech titans has resulted in the conventional wisdom that somehow the web isn’t “enough”, that you have to tie yourself to proprietary platforms if you want to build a big brand or a big business.

True! Anil also points to an act of rebellion and resistance:

Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.

home sweet homepage

I can’t remember the last time that a website made me smile like this.

🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick

A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.

Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups

Speaking of hosting your own reading list, Maggie recently attended an indie web pop-up on personal libraries, which prompted these interesting thoughts on decentralised book clubs—ad hoc reading groups:

Taking a book-first, rather than a group-first approach would enable reading groups who don’t have to compromise on their book choices. They could gather only once or twice to discuss the book, then go their seperate ways. No long-term committment to organising and maintaining a bookclub required.