Robin Rendle:
It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process.
The web today is built for apps—and I think we need to take it back.
Frank Chimero writes about the design process for the header navigation on his personal site:
You’d imagine that a seasoned and soured designer would side-step all of these complications whenever they could. And indeed, most do. Visit many designers’ websites and you will see two links in the navigation: Work and Info. Bully for them. I am, on the other hand, an unsympathetic and frustrated creative. I have a sprawling empire of conflicted uselessness locked into the coordinates of www dot frankchimero dot com. Welcome to my personal website, my empire of shit.
Oh how I understand Frank’s plight.
If you can read this, then I have achieved micropub capability and nothing can stop me now 🚀
Max Böck:
Posting a new short “note” on my site currently requires me to commit a new markdown file to the repository on Github. That’s doable (for a developer), but not really convenient, especially when you’re on the go and just want to share a quick link.
It me.
The new link sharing basically has three main parts:
- a small Javascript bookmarklet to act as a “share button”
- a form that collects and sends the shared link data, and
- a serverless function to process it and create a new file.
Gotta get on this train! I’m already working on it, though my solution will be based on the Micropub spec. But that live preview is sweet and now I want it too.
It’s 2019, and I have a blog now. This party is just getting started, right?
I managed to cheat the system and avoid kicking things off with an empty slate; I began collecting links about a year ago, and my notes go even further back. Looking at the whole feed, it’s beginning to look like something.
I expect to continue posting small updates frequently, but I want to turn that momentum into more substantial writing. That’s the exciting (and scary) part of this endeavor — the part I’ve always put off, with the lame excuse of not having some place on the web I could call my own.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. It took me over a year of overcomplicating it, but I now have a universe. Apple pie forthcoming.
David Heinemeier Hansson:
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.
Dave Rupert comments:
Blogging is back, baby! Awooo!
I’m definitely feeling the momentum. I’ve been acutely aware of it as I’ve worked on getting this blog up and running over the past year, and it’s only getting stronger.
Paul Robert Lloyd:
Such notions of craftsmanship can soon lead us down a dangerous path, raising questions around elitism and discrimination. These are accusations you could level towards the IndieWeb. For all its promise of giving people the tools to regain ownership of their online identity and content, to do so fully and effectively requires a proficiency for coding and familiarity with an endless barrage of acronyms. Encouraging participants to selfdogfood only exacerbates the near-impenetrability and narrowness of this movement.
Rob Weychert chimes in and gets a strong +1 from me:
I’ve been making websites for 20 years. I read a bunch about how to set up webmentions and gave up before I started. 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/iIv1BgQXlY
— Rob Weychert (@robweychert) November 27, 2018
If even web people find it difficult, how can we ever manage to empower non-web people to produce web-like content?
Jeremy Keith at Webstock 2018:
I also think we should remember the original motto of the World Wide Web, which was: let’s share what we know. And over the next few days, you’re going to hear a lot of amazing, inspiring ideas from amazing, inspiring people and I hope that you would be motivated to maybe share your thoughts. You could share what you know on Mark Zuckerberg’s website. You could share what you know on Ev Williams’s website. You could share what you know on Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey’s website. But I hope you’ll share what you know on your own website.