there's honestly nothing substantial i wanna promote about the blog post itself, but i just want people to see the fruits of my labor figuring out theme switching for the first time 🥺 #webmasterbaby #neocities #indieweb

https://jasm1nii.neocities.org/blog/

New blog post today on how I went about using an old project of mine to learn about data compression.

#IndieWeb #blog #python #JavaScript
https://www.vzqk50.com/blog/squishing-circles/

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting to Threads. I like the foundation Meta has built with Threads and expect it to be successful, but I’m going to scale back my use until ActivityPub is ready. Most of what I write (including this!) needs to start on my blog.

Replying to a Mastodon post from the blog

#mastodonapi #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Updated my whoami page to update my career experience, and to remove my twitter link đź’€

#IndieWeb
https://www.vzqk50.com/whoami/

#Indieweb "silenced" #Liberdon not just without due process but without an accusation. Liberdon was put on a #blocklist with no reason given, and the Indieweb admin actually asked me to provide some accusations! He says he's still "investigating" the non-charges, but we're presumed guilty until he can think of something we're guilty of.

I got a spammy message via my contact page from “PostBy AI” trying to sell me on adding a chatbot to my site to answer customer questions, generate leads, yada yada. Annoying, but not a big deal in itself.

The part that really bugged me, though, was “I went ahead and created a custom chatbot tailored for your site, and want to let you try it out for free.” I find that to be a really creepy practice if they actually had their software train against the text on my site, so I replied with the email below. I’ll update here based on how they reply.

Was this message generated by a chat bot? It doesn’t seem like a human looked at my website at all. I have no need for any of the things listed because it’s not a business site and there are no sales. It’s just my personal site that I share things on.

I think it’s a creepy practice to create a chatbot tailored to my site without my request or permission. If you have scraped information from my site or trained an LLM against its content, please remove all such data from your systems immediately.

Also please let me know what user agent your software uses so I can add it to my robots.txt disallow list, or let me know what other methods your software respects to let a site opt out.

— gRegor Morrill via email

Oof. They responded to me:

You're making a lot of demands for someone who did something nice for you. It's your responsibility to add your own robot files, not mine.

However, I've destroyed the bot and removed you from any scraping on my end.

I just wrote back:

What an absolutely unprofessional response. “Please remove my data” is a polite request and should be understandable for your business, regardless of whether you think you’ve done something “nice” for me.

Yes, robots.txt is for me to update. That’s why I requested what user agent your software uses so I can update accordingly. Please let me know.

I got a spammy message via my contact page from “PostBy AI” trying to sell me on adding a chatbot to my site to answer customer questions, generate leads, yada yada. Annoying, but not a big deal in itself.

The part that really bugged me, though, was “I went ahead and created a custom chatbot tailored for your site, and want to let you try it out for free.” I find that to be a really creepy practice if they actually had their software train against the text on my site, so I replied with the email below. I’ll update here based on how they reply.

Was this message generated by a chat bot? It doesn’t seem like a human looked at my website at all. I have no need for any of the things listed because it’s not a business site and there are no sales. It’s just my personal site that I share things on.

I think it’s a creepy practice to create a chatbot tailored to my site without my request or permission. If you have scraped information from my site or trained an LLM against its content, please remove all such data from your systems immediately.

Also please let me know what user agent your software uses so I can add it to my robots.txt disallow list, or let me know what other methods your software respects to let a site opt out.

— gRegor Morrill via email

Oof. They responded to me:

You're making a lot of demands for someone who did something nice for you. It's your responsibility to add your own robot files, not mine.

However, I've destroyed the bot and removed you from any scraping on my end.

I just wrote back:

What an absolutely unprofessional response. “Please remove my data” is a polite request and should be understandable for your business, regardless of whether you think you’ve done something “nice” for me.

Yes, robots.txt is for me to update. That’s why I requested what user agent your software uses so I can update accordingly. Please let me know.

Steve Ivy

Dammit I started a branch on Goldfrog to play with the #micropub api, and now that it’s in pieces on the editor floor, I have 3 more features I want to add. #indieweb #blogging

(One is adding the ability for a note or post here to be a reply to another post on Mastodon.)

~ # 17:53 ~

I like eye-candy for my #WordPress #hCard and for the longest time I did override the generic icon for missing SVGs via CSS. This never fixed the titles thought and after starting to mass non descriptive links all named “website” I started to dig into the code class-relme-domain-icon-map.php of the #IndieWeb plugin.

Turns out Rel_Me_Domain_Icon_Map does some file system shacking for unknown domains in wp-content/plugins/indieweb/static/svg/ so I fixed myself some symbolic links:

discuss-dot-tchncs-dot-de.svg -> lemmy.svg
live-dot-famkos-dot-net.svg -> owncast.svg
nerdpol-dot-ch.svg -> diaspora.svg
social-dot-tchncs-dot-de.svg -> mastodon.svg
t-dot-me.svg -> telegram.svg
tube-dot-tchncs-dot-de.svg -> peertube.svg
[...]

The title is read directly from the SVG so adding a title tag so custom SVGs helps with that.

That’s a lot of CSS that I can remove now 🤓

#hcard #indieweb #wordpress

https://beko.famkos.net/2023/08/07/15628749/

Pixelfed cross-posting in Micro.blog

Writing a new post for my cartoon blog to feature a few posts from this other blog that did a lot of great posts about old animation. But as I was writing and doing my research, I realized the posts for this other blog stopped in 2017 (after being active since 2009). Such a shame. It's always sad to see cool blogs disappear.

#IndieWeb #blogs #blogging #writing #cartoons #animation #PersonalWebsites

As a lifelong nerd and an #Indieweb fan to boot, I absolutely see the appeal of "Everything is just a post".

I also recognize that sometimes you have to compromise on perfect, symmetrical beauty in order to shape technology into how people actually want to use it. (And, perhaps more to the point, away from how people shouldn't use it.)

If you’ve ever wanted a one-page website for free, and the ability to connect your domain name to that website, also on the free plan(!), this new service looks really promising: realnice

https://getrealnice.com/

#OnlineResilience #Indieweb

If you’ve ever wanted a one-page website for free, and the ability to connect your domain name to that website, also on the free plan(!), this new service looks really promising: realnice

https://getrealnice.com/

#OnlineResilience #Indieweb

Great essay.

"When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

"Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore."

Features Mastodon as the anti-"normal web" social media platform.

https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

#Mastodon #AdBlocker #IndieWeb

Fellow #wordpress #blogging #indieweb friends, I have a question you might have an answer to. I want to import my Mastodon posts into my blog. The question is how. Please read what I’m looking for. Boost when you think your network can help me. https://infullflow.net/2023/08/how-can-i-import-mastodon-posts-into-wordpress/

I’m still waiting to see how DMs evolve in the fediverse before deciding what to do with Micro.blog, but one thing I’m sure of: we’re not going to have messaging that isn’t encrypted. Private replies to Mastodon users (which works now) will remain as a legacy feature, mostly hidden away.

Interesting what @dansup@mastodon.social is up to with a new messaging app called Sup. Early video demo is here. Sounds like it uses Mastodon to connect with users, but Signal protocol instead of ActivityPub for messaging. Meanwhile I still like Nostr’s approach to encrypted DMs.