Notes – David Bushell
David is on board. Who else?
David is on board. Who else?
My new favourite blog on Tumblr.
When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.
Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.
No one is policing this.
The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
Blogging isn’t one thing and that’s kind of the point. It exists fractured by intention and it can be many things to many people. And now, 20 years after the last blogging revolution, something like a fractured digital presence is once again appealing.
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.
One of the reasons to own your content is to make it last. When you have control of the text you write or the photos you post, it’s up to you whether that content stays on the internet. When you post to someone else’s platform, you’ve given up that control. It’s not up to you whether the company that hosts your content will stay in business or change everything to break your content.
It me:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
I suspect that in a few years’ time, we’ll look back at this month, and especially Jeremy and Eric’s articles as an inflection point. Similar to how Ethan managed to make responsive web design accessible to more people, I think we’re looking at the same thing happening right now for web components.
A great summary (with links) of all the recent buzz around HTML web components:
I don’t know about you, but I read every one of those articles, and for the first time, web components “clicked” for me. Suddenly, I understood how they could fit into our workflow, and where they’d be a good addition. I was excited about web components in a way I’d never been before.
A good overview of syndicating from your own website to social network silos:
The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
References and contributors include Cory Doctorow, Manton Reece, Matt Mullenweg and, of course, Tantek.
I enjoyed reading this interview with Jim Nielsen, much as I enjoy reading Jim’s blog. He says:
The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way.
That chimes with what Matthias says in the first issue of his new newsletter:
On your personal site, getting it wrong is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a chance to start small, take first steps, learn, edit, and improve. It’s an invaluable opportunity to evolve and to grow.
I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules.
And I really like his motivation for trying out comments:
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Yes! More experiments like this please! Experiments that aren’t just “let’s clone Twitter”.
This makes feel all warm and fuzzy:
At the time, I was disheartened by the tech industry and terrified of doing a tech post. I thought those things were for everyone else but me.
Only at the end of 2017 did something shift inside me, thanks to Jeremy Keith’s talk at the ViewSource conference. I discovered the IndieWeb community, and with that came the reassurance that my “nicheless” blog was absolutely okay.
Thanks to that feeling of acceptance, from 2018 onwards, my confidence really picked up, and I was blogging frequently, including web development things!
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:
When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.
I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.
This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.
What a beautiful website!
A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.
Every one of these 42 articles are gold!
It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.
Some really interesting long-term thinking from Matt—it’ll be interesting to see the terms and conditions.
I just don’t care what you think, here’s my post and you can do nothing about it :)