#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

A new instance means a new introduction. Hi, I'm RDK! I'm a blind Apple entusiast. I write primarily about indie apps, workflows, accessibility, and much more on my blog from the perspective of a screen reader user.

You will also find several categories, such as blogging and weeknotes.

https://justtext.net

#introduction #accessibility #apps #indieWeb #blogging #writing
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

It seems like these days everyone wants to train their AI on your content. Not surprising that more and more creators start looking for better ways to share their work. Read our latest guide and learn how to join #IndieWeb and #ownyourdata: https://buff.ly/3S2NOPM
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

feito mais um puxadinho no meu site :cobrinha:

lhes apresento a página whats up? https://guites.dev/whatsup/ , fazendo uma chupeta no rss da bolha

#indieweb
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

Por cierto, dejo un artículo que publiqué hace más de un año en el blog, uno de los primeros y más grandes. En él hacía algunas reflexiones sobre la sociedad, su dinámica y la salud mental teniendo en cuenta la tecnología y la vida digital. Ahí ya hacía referencia a Kaczynski o al psiquiatra Thomas Szasz.

Una sociedad ansiosa y deprimida

#sociedad #blog #indieweb

https://thecheis.com/2023/04/01/una-sociedad-ansiosa-y-deprimida/
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

How are people getting into the Small Web and related movements these days (aside from fediverse)?

I missed the whole Yesterweb thing and just finished reading their website.

Is Neocities still a common platform for progressive netizens? Should I just self host? Are we going back to web rings? What about Gemini browsers?

Please help, lol. :blue_heart_pixel:

What are things looking like for 2024/2025?

#SmallWeb #indieweb #personalweb #webrevival
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

My July Summary | Welcome to BASIC

This felt longer than last month as I typed this post.

#blog #indieweb #blogging #TVShows #movies #anime

https://basic.bearblog.dev/my-july-summary/
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

After months of trying to find time to participate in the IndieWeb Carnival, I finally managed to eek out a post for the July topic of ‘Tools’. So check out what I wrote about the tools I use as a UX designer in Instruments for Empathy.
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

If someone were to ask me what tools I use to do my job, the answer might surprise some of you. Even 20 years deep into this field, I still encounter misunderstandings about what UX designers actually do. Some think our work revolves around creating wireframes and user flows or making things look aesthetic, but it goes much deeper than that.


UX design is about understanding human behavior, motivations, and needs. It’s most certainly not about the software or gadgets we use but how we use those technologies to meet those motivations and needs.


As a UX designer, I rely heavily on tools that help me gain insight and understanding of people. These tools typically fall into several broad categories, and they consistently and relentlessly change. What remains constant, however, is the goal of our work - to empathize with users and create solutions, through design, that truly address their pain points and enhance their experiences.


The tools I use can be segmented into those we use for research, facilitation, capturing conversations, analyzing data, and communicating concepts and ideas.


1. Research


Research is how we gain empathy, understand behavior and make sense of what people’s needs and desires are. The two biggest tools needed here are:


Expanding Knowledge


In the realm of Research, we focus on gaining empathy and understanding user behavior. Research tools help us uncover the needs and desires of our users, allowing us to design with intention and clarity. What’s most useful here are tools that keep me informed of new methods, processes, other research and ways to manage that knowledge.



  • Books. I can’t read enough of them. My wish list contains enough reading for 100 people for the next 100 years. I’m not sure how I’m going to tackle that. Classic’s like Don’t Make Me Think to more recent books like the Stanford d.school’s collection are books I proudly display on my bookshelf.
  • Feed Reader. Staying current is crucial. Tools like Tiny Tiny RSS or Inoreader help aggregate industry news, blogs, and academic papers in one place. I like to see what people have to say on the fediverse and avoid corporate platforms like I do people.
  • Access to Research. There’s a lot of it out there and in much more depth than you would normally see on the internet where a lot of articles are a bit frivolous or just reiterate what everyone has been saying for 20+ years. Tools like Researcher App, or R Discovery have both come in handy.
  • Conferences & Webinars. There are so many free and actually good conferences and webinars. I’ve been hooked on accessibility ones from TPGi and spend a good bit of my time on LinkedIn Learning.
  • Knowledge Management. What’s to be done with all that knowledge, especially if you want to keep it handy? There’s always LogSeq or Obsidian (which I’m quite a fan of).

Recruitment


Finding the right people to talk to and to share their experiences ensures our research studies are both relevant and insightful.



  • Email. Sometimes you just have to reach out to people. I’d recommend one that’s not a Gmail one.
  • Social Media. Platforms like Mastodon or Reddit can help reach a wide group of people pretty quickly, and there’s no shortage of people that want to share their opinions and experiences.
  • Professional Recruitment Services. Services like User Interviews or Respondent can streamline the recruitment process if you’re looking for some very specific groups of people, want a lot of people and have the money to do it.
  • Appointment Management. Tools like Cal or Calendly make scheduling interviews almost enjoyable.

Capturing Conversations & Behavior



  • Notetaking. Whether it’s pen & paper or a digital solution, taking notes is critical. I’ve been using Rocketbook for ages after trying basically every digital one there is. Not having to charge a pen or tablet comes in handy but using something as simple as pen and paper helps to be more present and connected in conversations.
  • Audio Recorder. It’s impossible to write down everything. Having a complete record of the conversation, every small detail and quote, means you have the data to go back to. There are plenty of physical recorders if you want to look like a reporter, like the Zoom H1 but really any phone app works well. I’m fond of Fossify Voice Recorder for Android
  • Transcription. You can either listen back to all the audio you’re recorded and transcribe it yourself with something like oTranscribe or you can let a transcription service like Otter take a stab at it.
  • Video Camera. Observing users in their natural habitat for Ethnography studies or capturing users interacting with a mobile device requires some video capturing. Your phone’s camera is often sufficient for recording usability tests or contextual inquiries but I’ve found that a cheap webcam and a tripod will do the trick.
  • Screen Recorder. A tool like OBS Studio, the de facto standard among streamers, is a great way to capture lots of sources. This will let you get both the screen and an external camera at the same time. The built-in screen recording features on your OS can sometimes do in a pinch.
  • Eye Tracker. Whether it’s a $20 DIY rig or $4,000 professional one like the Tobii Pro Glasses 3, eye tracking can reveal a good bit about what users are perceiving and where they get fixated.
  • Biometrics Recorder. Monitoring physiological responses can provide deep insights into user reactions and engagement levels - yes, that stupid mega menu can cause a bit of a panic. Someone needs to work on some better open source tools for this but a tool like Pulsoid can integrate into OBS.
  • Site Capture. PostHog or HotJar can record website interactions, providing heatmaps and session recordings when you can’t be there in person.
  • Analytics. AwStats or Google Analytics offer quantitative data to track user behavior and performance metrics.

2. Facilitating Conversations


Beyond tools, the right mindset is essential. Facilitation skills ensure that research sessions are productive and that participants feel safe to share their honest opinions and experiences.



  • A Positive and Encouraging Environment. Creating a space where participants feel comfortable and valued is crucial for effective UX research. Digitally, that might be about doing activities that help people open up. Physically, that could be a creative space with Legos and comfy chairs (yeh, I’m that person). Both environments should give a voice to all of the participants.
  • Sticky Notes. Whether physical Post-Its or digital notes in tools like FigJam, they are indispensable for brainstorming and organizing thoughts during workshops.
  • Whiteboards. An old-school tool, but highly effective for mapping out ideas, user flows, and brainstorming sessions. I’ve been using Rocketbook Beacons to capture and transcribe my scribbles.
  • Digital Collaboration Tools. FigJam and Miro are great tools to help facilitate remote collaboration, allowing teams to brainstorm and organize ideas in real time, no matter where they are. If anyone has any open source recommendations here, PLEASE let me know.

3. Analysis and Insight



  • More Whiteboards. I spend a lot of time moving sticky notes around digital whiteboards. See above.
  • Spreadsheets. Sometimes there’s a lot of data to go through. LibreOffice Calc or Airtable are reasonable here.

4. Presenting Findings & Concepts


Sometimes you have to create something in order to communicate your ideas. Often times it’s a drawing, diagram, prototype, presentation or report.



  • Drawings & Diagrams. PenPot or Figma
  • Prototypes. Again PenPot or Figma if you must.
  • Presentations.
  • Reports. I write a good bit of these.

5. Validation



  • Pretotyping: Testing ideas can be fun and there’s a lot of techniques to do it - things like Fake Front Door tests are one among an arsenal of measuring ideas. I wrote a little bit about it in Validating and measuring ideas before falling victim to sunk cost fallacy."
  • A/B Testing Tools. Tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize allow you to run experiments and see which design variations perform better, providing data-driven insights for decision-making.
  • Unmoderated Usability Testing: Services like UserTesting and Lookback enable remote usability testing, capturing user interactions and feedback in real time.

6. Leveling Up


I always want to be better. The three biggest tools I have to continue to level up in addition to anything that’s mentioned here are:



  • Practice. Continuous practice is key to mastering interview techniques and gaining deeper insights. I practice every usability test, interview and facilitated session before ever taking it to the streets.
  • Observation. Watching interviews, whether they are late-night talk shows or police interrogations, can provide valuable lessons in reading body language, asking the right questions, and creating rapport. Paying attention while on the other side of facilitated conversations also helps to learn new methods, approaches and techniques.
  • Feedback. Seeking feedback from peers and mentors can provide new perspectives and highlight areas for improvement in your approach. Always ask for feedback and never be satisfied with yourself.

In Conclusion


Don’t fall in love with the tools, fall in love with what you’re using those tools to accomplish.


This post was written as part of the July 2024 IndieWeb Carnival, hosted this month by James. I really like to utilize deadlines. As of posting this, it’s still July somewhere in the world. Thank’s for inviting the participation and to those with the original idea.
Mark Sutherland marksuth.dev

IndieWeb Movie Club

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#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

the 32-bit cafe is hosting our 5th (!!) community code jam, running from august 4th-17th!

our theme this time is *back to school*! any style of webpage (blog post, image gallery, coding experiment, etc.) is welcome to be submitted to this code jam, as long as it centers around a topic you either know a lot about, want to learn about, or are actively learning! teach us about new things through your submissions!

join us, a lot of folks are excited about this one!

https://32bit.cafe/~xandra/events/codejam5/

#smallweb #codejam #32bitcafe #indieweb #personalweb #webevent #webdev #cozyweb #internet #html #css #js
Marty McGuire martymcgui.re

Oh! Dang! Many thanks to Kristof for pointing out a glaring oversight in my recent updates to make the IndieWeb Webring 🕸️💍 more deterministic:

https://kiko.io/notes/2024/The-fun-of-randomness-in-a-Webring/

I forgot to give the “random site” feature its own link!

It’s back! You can now visit 🕸️💍.ws/random to go to a random active site on the ring.

It’s also linked on the landing page of the webring.

For best results, add it to your bookmarks! 🔖🕸️💍🎲
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

Now that I moved from Neocities to Bear for blogging, I’m hoping to post more frequently.

https://basic.bearblog.dev/from-neocities-to-bear/

#blogs #blogging #indieweb
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

For someone with a plain old static website who literally just drags and drops the files to a plain old web server using my file browser, all of this #indieweb stuff seems so complicated!
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

On https://bookstacks.app, I replaced #Django ImageKit with barebones code to create thumbnails when images are uploaded. Pages with lots of thumbnails are now NOTICEABLY faster. It boggles my mind that this isn’t a solved problem. Images and CDNs (DigitalOcean Spaces in this case) and SPEED!

#IndieWeb
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

Front End Study Hall is tomorrow, August 1 2024! More info https://events.indieweb.org/2024/08/front-end-study-hall-008-BVfQ91G65DtL #IndieWeb #css #html #webdev #coding

About

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#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

My interests: #webStandards #HTML #CSS #SVG #RSS #Webmentions #Microdata #privacy #accessibility #progressiveEnhancement #openWeb #IndieWeb
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

So, as you all know, I stay in the #IndieWeb and love reading RSS feeds and such! To be honest, I love my RSS feeds a billion times more than I love Mastodon and the Fediverse. For ages, I've been reading https://marcorogers.com/ and I can't remember how I even found his website in the first place, but I also just found him on the Fedi! I mean, not to put a spotlight on him or anything, but I love stumbling across people on social media that I've been reading for months via RSS feed. It's like I'm walking through a town and suddenly I see someone from afar and think, they wrote about cats last year and I loved it! @polotek
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

How do we keep the web open while keeping our work out of large language models? Should we even worry about it?
#AskMastodon #indieweb #blogging
#indieweb mastodon.social/tags/indieweb

send a friend a webmention day

Just a friendly hello to some pals from Homebrew Website Club! Joe, Sara, Tracy, James, Benji, Angelo, David, Pablo, gRegor, Jo… I’m sure there are several people I’m missing.

https://nicks.im/b/76G

#IndieWeb