[[jackson rising]]
https://commonplace.doubleloop.net/jackson-rising
Sorry for the noise.
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.
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
Ouch! Lesson learned:
My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does.
Here’s another great post about the IndieWeb Personal Libraries pop-up, from Maggie Appleton who facilitated a session on reading groups.
Here’s another great post about the IndieWeb Personal Libraries pop-up, from Maggie Appleton who facilitated a session on reading groups.
Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re about to enter a golden age of personal blogs.
Make it easy for people to find you. Buy a domain name and use it to create your own website, even if it’s very simple at first. Your website is your resume, your business card, your store, your directory, and your personal magazine. It’s the one place online that you completely own and control – your Online Home.
Good advice. Also:
Don’t write on Medium.
Look, I get it. Writing on Medium is an easy way to pick up readers and increases your chances of going viral. But the costs exceed the benefits. Medium is terrible for SEO. You don’t own your content and the platform makes it difficult to turn one-time readers into loyal ones.
The more you can use platforms you own, the better. Rather than writing on Medium, do the work to build a personal blog. That way, you can have a central place to point people to.
Great write-up by @ton of yesterday’s IndieWeb Personal Libraries pop-up session. I thought the sessions were a good start, and it helped me prioritize what to work on. Now we need to continue the discussion in blog posts and the IndieWeb wiki with some more next steps.
Great write-up by @ton of yesterday’s IndieWeb Personal Libraries pop-up session. I thought the sessions were a good start, and it helped me prioritize what to work on. Now we need to continue the discussion in blog posts and the IndieWeb wiki with some more next steps.
What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.
There’s a sort of joy in getting to manually create the site of your own where you have the freedom to add anything you want onto it, much like a homemade meal has that special touch to it.
The books pop-up session is this weekend. I’m trying to get Epilogue 1.1 done before then, maybe with IndieAuth support so it’ll be more useful to IndieWeb folks not using Micro.blog.
- You’re the curator
- You decide what’s interesting
- You have more control over what you read and how
- It’s a fast and efficient way of reading a lot of web
- It’s just better than the endless scroll of a social media feed
Spot on!
To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.
To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.
That’s what using RSS feeds feels like.