🔖 Bookmarked Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/
I’ve decided. My website is in need of an overhaul. I like the concept of cultivating a digital garden whilst also combining some of the social aspects of the IndieWeb, so in the New Year I’ll don my gloves, a trowel and see how I get on!
I couldn't sleep so got up for a drink and did a little more work on the non-WordPress version of the.
It's still intrinsically linked to WordPress because it currently just retrieves the post sections from the database that are created within the main site but, ultimately, I'd like to make it a fully self-contained system.
I'll need to sort out some kind of functionality for logging in and will need to rethink posting and how sections are stored. What will be a little more problematic is working out commenting should I decide to include it.
I would also lose webmentions because my coding skills really don't extend as far as rolling my own solution for that. This, in turn, means that I would lose the current "related posts" feature.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with all of this, or what compromises I'm willing to make, but it would be nice to be able to say I use my own blogging engine.
I’ve released version 0.0.3 of mf2 to iCalendar, a library to convert h-event microformats into iCalendar.
It no longer throws an Exception if no h-event microformats are found. Instead it will generate a minimal, “empty” iCalendar. I had run into an instance where an upcoming events page was empty and the URL for the iCalendar was returning the Exception message.
I also changed the default domain to example.com, did some minor code cleanup, and renamed the git master branch to main.
Simon Collison | This used to be our playground
Tending this website keeps me sane. I think of it as a digital garden, a kind of sanctuary. … And if my site is a kind of garden, then I see myself as both gardener and architect, in so much as I make plans and prepare the ground, then sow things that grow in all directions. Some things die, but others thrive, and that’s how my garden grows. And I tend it for me; visitors are a bonus.
A thoughtful and impassioned plea from Colly for more personal publishing:
I know that social media deprived the personal site of oxygen, but you are not your Twitter profile, nor are you your LinkedIn profile. You are not your Medium page. You are not your tiny presence on the company’s About page. If you are, then you look just like everyone else, and that’s not you at all. Right?
Indieweb - Restoring people's control over their online presence improvingthe.net
Make it Personal | CSS-Tricks
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.
Grow the IndieWeb with Webmentions | Amber Wilson
Amber describes how she implemented webmentions on her (static) site. More important, she describes why!
Creating a Personal IndieAuth Server
Announcing the release of my personal IndieAuth server, and what I've spent my time on.
IndieAuth Spec Updates 2020
This year, the IndieWeb community has been making progress on iterating and evolving the IndieAuth protocol. IndieAuth is an extension of OAuth 2.0 that enables it to work with personal websites and in a decentralized environment.
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re 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, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.
Always nice to see a new webmention implementation
# 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:
- how to create sections and make them linkable
- how to retain the ability to post webmention 'likes'
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 🎉 now I just need to clean up a few bits and add some logging for debugging, then we're good to go 😱