Finally, an update to my now page, including a listen brainz widget and a bookwyrm widget, yay open sauce

Content warning for food mention

https://www.pixouls.xyz/now.html

#html #htmlEnergy #personalSite #personalWebsite #indieWeb

i spent a while making this @gohugoio theme and even tho it may have some rough edges codewise, i think it's headed in the right direction:

https://betterwebsites.dev/

#betterwebsites #blog #blogging #webdev #indieweb

Make what you need might be all wrong for the IndieWeb’s future

IndieWeb has this idea of “scratch your own itch” or “make what you need“. It’s okay in as far as it goes, but I (and I said this at great length before) feel it is wholly incomplete over simple, and, therefore, wrong.

I get the idea. If I want a cheese sandwich, I should go into the kitchen and make myself a cheese sandwich. Fine. Cool. But I’m not making what I need – I’m assembling the prefabricated parts.

I did not first have to make a bread knife, and a butter knife, and a plate, and a chopping board. I did not have to bake the bread. I did not have to spend a year or two maturing milk into cheese. I did not build the kitchen or the worktops. In fact, I did not build what I needed at all. I acquired well-made things I needed so that when the time came, I could put the cheese and the bread together in a pleasing shape.

In the same way, “make what you need” works well when IndieWeb is a frontier wild west of ideas. Where the only ones making the new tools are the ones using those tools and only because those were the only nerds who could make the things.

We no longer live in the wild west. We live in towns. We go to supermarkets and order pizza delivered to our door.

I get that dogfooding is the best way to make sure the tools available are the best they can be. I’m not a novice at this. What I am saying is that it is time we started putting together pre-baked bread, already matured cheese, and a sharp knife that works out of the box.

Early adopters can and should make their own. That’s the innovation scale and space. But there has to come a time when we start embracing pre-sliced bread, cheese someone else made, and all that, without forcing everyone to fire up the forge because you want a sandwich.

If we want indieweb ideas to go from niche coders doing niche coder things, we need something the next wave of later-early adopters can get to grips with. In such an environment, “make what you need” is not good enough. It has to give way to “make what those around you need” or “make something you can use, but your mum could use too”.

One example of “make what you need” screwing the pooch is the number of websites that stopped using WebMention because of spam. WebMention should, by its nature, be nearly spam-proof. I would hazard a guess that the roll-your-own WebMention did not follow the step where it confirms the link that forms the core mention.

When WebMention runs in WordPress, the mention fails if the link is not there. Then the mention, if from an unrecognised blog, is held in a queue to be manually checked. These steps mean that no spam makes it into my blog via WebMention. Via local comments – yeah, loads of spam; but WebMention – never.

There is an expression in developer circles which is a warning against reinventing the square wheel. By rolling their own, some devs will make an objectively worse version. There might be better versions too; its a wild world out there. The point is, though, rather than reinventing the wheel for each and every website, some battle-hardened, mature, production-ready, tested and true tools and libraries might offer something of an advantage.

That’s the power of Open Source development. One person makes a thing; a bunch of people use the thing; someone has an idea for a new feature and adds it. I think IndieWeb needs that too. At the very least, “make what you need” should become “adapt what you need; reuse when possible”.

Check out my longer form post: Let’s talk about making IndieWeb weirder and easier

#IndieWeb #makeWhatYouNeed #rollYourOwn

I'm glad to have found #indieweb and folks within it clearly are amongst those that are "knowing where ones's towel is" - to quote 'Phrases from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' on wikipedia.org

I would like to think that the #indieweb is not just about owning your content on line. It can also be about sharing and making knowledge available to others. I seem to remember that was 'the way' back in the 90's at what was for me at least the dawn of the interwebs

https://indieweb.social/@jdarnold/114965268793183507

I thought I'd share some of the sites, webrings, challenges, events and directories where my site has been linked on!

Post 8 of #Blaugust2025

https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/webrings-clubs-and-blogrolls-im-part-of

#Blaugust #Blogging #IndieWeb #SmallWeb #Blogroll #Blogpost #Webring

🦸 Everybody's talking about Superman, and I'm still stuck on Batman... from 13 years ago.
https://hisvirusness.com/batman-returned-in-2012
#DC #Batman #TheDarkKnight #IndieWeb

IndieWeb Carnival August 2025 : Colo(u)rs

The IndieWeb Carnival for August 2025 is out, and the theme is colours. It is hosted by Marisabel.

Marisabel has asked five questions, so let’s give them a go

What shade lives in your bones?

This one. It is hex code #FFFFCC. When I was younger, I found that this colour reduced reading strain, and it kind of became my go-to colour for highlights and background colour when I wanted less dyslexic interference.

A close second is #666 when I want a darkish colour and can’t be bothered to think any deeper about it. The number of the beast is a good go-to grey.

When has colour saved you?

Only in the broadest sense has colour saved me per se. Like the green man says, walk – that sort of thing.

Do you dream in technicolour or monochrome?

My dreams are always full-colour cinematic epics. Check out my dream logs for some ideas about the content of my dreams.

What colours define your homeland? Your life?

Red, White, and Blue are the colours of the Union Flag, but, unlike America, we don’t tend to worship our flag. For a long time, our buses were always red, our police always blue, and… Nuh, I can’t come up with something for white. Unless you count our hospitals, which seem to love white paint; UK hospitals are, of course, free at the point of use. The NHS saved my life with medication I could not have afforded even if I had a house to mortgage.

Any meaning colour might have in your life!

There are some colours which are important to my life.

  • Black – I was a bit of a metal head crossed with a goth as a youth. Black is, therefore, part of my tribal (subculture) colours.
  • White – just because it contrasts easily with black.
  • Purple – see also goth.
  • Silver – as above, but more so.
  • Blue – because I am also a tech nerd.
  • Green – trees and plants are part of my soul.
  • Pale Yellow – I find it easier to read
  • Brown – this is my name and the colour of the drink of the gods – tea!

Yes, that is a horrendous colour palette. I dare you to try and make a nice-looking CSS style with it.

Over to you

What does colour mean to you?

#666 #Carnival #color #colour #FFFFCC #IndieWeb

Following this up with a simple way to make a basic webpage.

(No need to tinker with the command line or worry about static site generators.)

https://mattl.github.io/simple-html-file-generator/ lets you make a new webpage right in your browser, no server or database needed (JavaScript required)

#indieweb #html #css #opensource

ok, new account, new #introduction it seems

call me arch (or my middle name, if you happen to know it already *wink*). perhaps the youngest on this server as i'm in my early 20s. you may have seen me as a janitor of a certain non-mastodon instance.

born in deepest voids of poland, the fate decided i flee to the netherlands, currently haunting the province of gelderland with my presence. what comes afterwards is an unknown.

at the time of writing, i'm pretty much a NEET, but i try to find every joy that i can in my reality, as worries only make everything worse.

in my free time i do art. medium bounces between run-of-the-mill raster digital art and pixel art, as i have abandoned the pen and paper very early when i was still a kid, the moment i discovered drawing tablets exist, and thus begged my parents for my very first wacom.

below is a piece i finished a few days ago as a gift for a friend.

my interests go around surface-level knowledge of #retrocomputing, especially gaming consoles of 90s and 2000s, hoarding software and hardware i think i can find use for some day (guy who owns 2 macbooks, 2 non-apple laptops, a 2DS XL, an iPad, 3 different iPhone models, a steam deck; and is on his way to collect more devices if the funds allow me). from collecting i also collect plushies, mostly from favorite series such as #pokemon (i also have a TCG album that i re-started since i lost all my old cards, hi)

and, obviously, i like digital art. but, also, i fucking despise generative AI and similar creations in their modern meaning; if you're in support of Bullshit Generators this is not a place for you. support human art.

i used to have a website, but no longer have one, as being essentially someone with a fractured identity doesn't help in that department. one day i should put up another one again, if i get to do so. which may take a few months. i kind of fell out of love with being a webmaster, it has become boring and tedious for me, and i just try to find a place for myself in there.

this is not a safe space for techbros, fossbros, replypeople, virtue signalers, bigots of all flavors and Puyo Puyo fans.

i have been consciously trans since around 2014, most of that spent in closet, denial, questioning; only in 2025 did i manage to move forward medically and legally.

i can speak polish and english well enough to hold a conversation; dutch not so much.

feel free to treat this as an AMA thread, but be kind and think twice before sending something. as my tradition says, below is a tag spam for my interests and such.

#nintendo #videoGames #gaming #sega #webmaster #indieWeb #art #digitalArt #pixelArt

Last week I deployed a change to how I generate plain text versions of content on my website. This week I changed it again. And updated additional post types to use Markdown as their editing and storage format.

https://orangegnome.com/posts/3622/changelog-updated-plain-text-format-and-added-additional-markdown-support

#Html #WebDevelopment #Indieweb #Markdown #BeautifulSoup #Changelog #Microformats #Mistune #Html2Text

And that #IndieWeb Carnival post is https://marisabel.nl/public/blog/IndieWeb_Carnival_August_2025_:_Colors - please feel free to write to the prompt and submit with a #webmention!

Partly inspired by the #IndieWeb Carnival this month: a CodePen to allow a comparison of a line drawing with a version in color. #HTML + #CSS with a single JavaScript event handler to alter a CSS custom property. https://codepen.io/artlung/pen/zxvzMQr (also Shawn Kerri is amazing)

Finally! Rejoice! After 9 months I finally got the transcript of my talk tidied up and published it on my blog. Finally living up to the #IndieWeb spirit!

ohhelloana.blog/my-indieweb-...

Better late than never ☺️

Oh Hello Ana

Finally! Rejoice! After 9 months I finally got the transcript of my talk tidied up and published it on my blog. Finally living up to the #IndieWeb spirit!

https://ohhelloana.blog/my-indieweb-journey/

Better late than never ☺️

How many webring memberships are too many?

#blog #webring #indieweb