I have been reminded time and time again of the utility of writing. How it is a way to turn messy thoughts into coherent ideas, and how – as we all know – practice makes perfect. So I’m going to give it a go.
Welcome to the indie web, Sam!
In which Eric says:
Jeremy Keith, you magnificent son of a bitch.
I’ll take it.
Appropriately enough, I read this post in my feed reader.
A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
This is an interesting little blogging tool: it turns a folder of notes on your Mac into a website.
- Create dedicated folder in the Apple Notes.
- Connect it to Montaigne.
- Add notes with your content.
- Everything will be published to the web automatically.
Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.
Ben wrote a post a little while back about maybe organising his home page differently. It’s currently a stream.
That prompted Om to ask is “stream” as a design paradigm over? Mind you, he’s not talking about personal websites:
Across the web, one can see “streams” losing their preeminence. Social networks are increasingly algorithmically organized, so their stream isn’t really a free-flowing stream. It is more like a river that has been heavily dammed. It is organized around what the machine thinks we need to see based on what we have seen in the past.
Funnily enough, I’ve some recent examples of personal homepages become more like social networks, at least in terms of visual design. A lot of people I know are liking the recent redesigns from Adam and Jhey.
Here on my site, my home page is kind of a stream. I’ve got notes, links, and blog posts one after another in chronological order. The other sections of my site are ways of focusing in on the specific types of content links, short notes, blog posts in my journal.
Behind the scenes, entries those separate sections of my site are all stored in the same database table. In some ways, the separation into different sections of the site is more like tagging. So the home page is actually the simplest bit to implement: grab the latest 20 entries out of that database table.
I don’t make too much visual distinction between the different kinds of posts. My links and my notes look quite similar. And if I post a lot of commentary with a link, it looks a lot like a blog post.
Maybe I should make them more distinct, visually. Because I actually like the higgedly-piggedly nature of a stream of different kinds of stuff. I want the vibe to be less like a pristine Apple store, and more like a chaotic second-hand bookstore.
Going back to what Ben wrote about his site:
As of right now, the homepage is a mix of long-form posts, short thoughts, and links I consider interesting, presented as a stream. It’s a genuine representation of what I’m reading and thinking about, and each post’s permalink page looks fine to me, but it doesn’t quite hold together as a whole. If you look at my homepage with fresh eyes, my stream is a hodgepodge. There’s no through line.
For me, that’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no through line on my home page either. I like that.
I hadn’t come across this before: a barebones blogging tool with built-in fediverse support—neat!
Ever get the urge to style a good document?
No? Just me, then.
Well, the urge came over me recently so I started styling this single-page site:
A Few Notes On The Culture by Iain M Banks
I’ve followed this document across multiple locations over the years. It started life as a newsgroup post on rec.arts.sf.written in 1994. Ken McLeod published it there on Iain M Banks’s behalf.
The post complements the epic series of space opera books that Iain M Banks set in the anarcho-utopian society of The Culture. It’s a fascinating piece of world building, as well as an insight into the author’s mind.
I first became aware of it many few years later, after a copy had been posted to the web. That URL died, but Adrian Hon kept a copy on his site. Lots of copies keep stuff safe, so after contemplating linkrot, I made a copy on this site too.
But I recently thought that maybe it deserved a bit of art direction, so I rolled up my sleeves and started messing around, designing in the browser and following happy little accidents.
The finished result is still fairly sparse. It’s still entirely text, except for a background image that shows up if your screen is wide enough. That image of a planet originally started as an infra-red snapshot of Jupiter by the James Webb Space Telescope that I worked over until it was unrecognisable.
The text itself is the main focus of the design though. I knew I wanted to play around with a variable font. Mona Sans from Github was one of the first ones I tried and I found it instantly suitable. I had a lot of fun playing with different weights and widths.
After a bit of messing around, I realised that the heading styles were reminding me of some later reissues of The Culture novels, so I leant into that, deliberately styling the byline to resemble the treatment of the author’s name on those book covers.
There isn’t all that much CSS. I’ve embedded it in the head of the HTML rather than linking to a separate style sheet, so feel free to view source and poke around in there. You’ll see that I’m making liberal use of custom properties, the clamp function, and logical properties.
Originally I had a light mode and dark mode but I found that the dark mode was much more effective so I ditched the lighter option.
I did make sure to include some judicious styles for print, so if you fancy reading on paper, it should print out nicely.
Oh, and of course it’s a progressive web app that works offline.
I didn’t want to mess with the original document other than making some typographic tweaks to punctuation, but I wanted to break up the single wall of text. I wasn’t about to start using pull quotes on the web so in the end I decided to introduce some headings that weren’t in the original document:
If your browser viewport is tall enough, the heading for the current section you’re reading will remain sticky as you scroll. No JavaScript required.
I’m pretty pleased with how this little project turned out. It was certainly fun to experiment with fluid type and a nice variable font.
I can add this to my little collection of single-page websites I’ve whittled over the years:
The past, present and future of blogs.
Especially if you are a designer, an artist, a photographer, a writer, a blogger, a creator of any kind, owning your work is as important as ever. Social media platforms might be great for distributing your content and creating a network of like-minded people around you. But they will always be ephemeral, transient, and impermanent – not the best place to preserve your thoughts, words, and brushstrokes.
Marcin’s book is coming along nicely—you just know it’ll be a labour of love.
You’ve never seen a book on technology like this. Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes.
The Kickstarter project launches in February. In the meantime, there are some keyboard-based games here for you to enjoy.
The more I look at this “issue” the more I’m convinced the solution is already right there and it’s called the web. Want to have an unblockable, unbannable user profile? Buy yourself a domain and get a personal website. Want to have a space where you can say and do whatever the fuck you want? Get a webspace and put up a blog.
I posted 1057 times on adactio in 2022.
That’s a bit more than in 2021.
November was the busiest month with 137 posts.
February was the quietest with 65 posts.
That included about 237 notes with photos and 214 replies.
I published one article, the transcript of my talk, In And Out Of Style.
I watched an awful lot of television but managed to read 25 books.
Elsewhere, I huffduffed 130 audio files and added 55 tune settings on The Session in 2022.
I spoke at ten events.
I travelled within Europe and the USA to a total of 18 destinations.
Here’s a highlight reel of some of my blog posts from 2022:
I also published the transcript of my conference talk, In And Out Of Style, a journey through the history of CSS.
Every time I’ve thought “this is a niche subject or random thought, no one will be interested but I’ll publish anyway” someone will let me know that it was the EXACT train of thought they were thinking or thing they were looking for.
Paul’s indie web project is live!
Meet the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish content to your personal website and share it on social networks.
You can read the accompanying blog post.
I’ve been very guilty of putting all my eggs in the Twitter basket over the last couple of years, especially, and all of that has been destroyed by one bellend billionaire. I’m determined not to make that mistake again and even more determined to make my little home on the internet—this website—as lovely and sustainable as I can make it.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?
Wouldn’t that be great?
A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.
Pour a foundation for your own silo or home.