On your personal website, you own your work. You decide what and when to publish. You decide when to delete things. You are in control. Your work, your rules, your freedom.
Amber describes how she implemented webmentions on her (static) site. More important, she describes why!
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: theyâre both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, thereâs potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.
# If you've been paying attention recently you'll have noticed that things have been changing. Take this recent screenshot:
It looks like four posts when it is, in fact, only one divided into sections with each one linkable. So, why do this?
I wrote in the latest muse-letter that I was 'considering taking the "blank slate" metaphor for each day even further', something that has been developing over time - the logical conclusion is for each day to become a single post along similar lines to Dave Winer's scripting.com - Winer uses his own purpose built software creating each day in an outliner.
I have now created a version of my Daily page template that takes the inline editing to the next level; the previous content filters originally designed for the digital garden are fully available and have been extended to add more functionality. If I choose to go this route I will, unlike before, be literally editing a blank page.
A couple of challenges presented themselves:
Both have been solved by adding additional content filters. To send a 'Like' I just need to enclose a link in double bracket delimiters '(())' - the filter simply replaces them with the relevant code.
Creating linkable sections needed a slightly different approach and I was initially unsure as to what markup to use but settled on adding two @ symbols. Why? Because two @s together are not used anywhere else in common parlance, at least as far as I can see. Markdown has a monopoly on a number of characters (#*->) and I've already used [, {, ( and ~ (I have two tildes as delimiters for strikethrough) so needed another option.
The filter counts the instances of double @s and then replaces each one with sequential links so that each section can be referenced separately.
I've already set the daily RSS feed as the default so that isn't an issue, the only thing it means is that there will not be the ability for comments on individual sections unless I can find a way round that.
Now I just need to think about when to make the switch.
Well, tonight at #HomebrewWebsiteClub Nottingham I managed to get my staging site using my new #indieauth server, and aside from a couple of hiccups, it works đ now I just need to clean up a few bits and add some logging for debugging, then we're good to go đ±
In an attempt to capture my content, I spent all day working on parsing Indieweb content in WordPress export files. How time flies when your figuring out regular expressions #mbnov
Growingâthatâs a word I want to employ when talking about my personal sites online. Like a garden, Iâm constantly puttering around in them. Sometimes I plow and sow a whole new feature for a site. Sometimes I just pick weeds.
I like this analogy. It reminds me of the the cooking analogy that others have made.
Most of my favorite websites out there are grownâhomegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their siteâand themselvesâshows growth and evolution and change through the years. Itâs a beautiful thing, a kind of artifact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.
This part of the web, this organic part, stands in start contrast to the industrial web where websites are made and resources extracted.
Continuing my periodic chore of uploading all Indiewebcamp videos to archive.org, just uploaded all of the videos I could find from IWC Nuremberg 2018. BecauseâŠwhy not?
Watching a livestream by @jlengstorf and @waterproofheart trying to make Bridgy work on a Netlify app. Lot of debugging still, with unhelpful errors.
Edit: they just brought next-netlify-webmention.com to solve the problem.
Zonelets is a simple HTML blogging engine with scrappy, DIY spirit! I made it because I really want everyone to blog, but I felt that the existing options were generally overcomplicated and commercially-focused in a way that made web creativity feel intimidating and arcane.
I love the philosophy behind this blogging tool, which actively encourages you to learn a little bit of HTML:
Plenty of services can help you to âcreate a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.â Now, thanks to Zonelets, you can create an UNPROFESSIONAL-looking website by writing NUMEROUS lines of code!
Didnât wind up touching any code this weekend during #indiewebcamp. I did do a lot of writing that I hope to publish at some point. Which is kinda the point in having a blog. And as it often works out, the code issue I wasnât seeing jumped right out tonight.