Link tags: personal

Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg

The return of RSS and POSSE points to a revival of the personal website ecosystem that thrived in the early blog era. Writers, researchers, technologists and more are relaunching their independent homepages, complete with feeds, as both a public notebook and a channel for sharing insights. The personal website is the ultimate sovereign territory online, enabling creators to share content on their own terms.

I feel like Joan Westenberg has come up with the perfect tag line for personal websites (emphasis mine):

By passing high-quality, human-centric content through their own lens of discernment before syndicating it to social networks, these curators create islands of sanity amidst oceans of machine-generated content of questionable provenance.

These are my jams · Paul Robert Lloyd

I like how Paul has recreated his own version of This Is My Jam and I really like how he’s done it with an HTML web component.

Permanence · Indie Microblogging

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.

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

Anil says the glass is half full:

Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.

I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format | Simon Reynolds | The Guardian

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.

build a world, not an audience — kening zhu

I didn’t want to play the game of striving to be seen.

I just wanted to be.

The personality of a personal website – Manu

Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.

Marbla

A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.

w/e 2023-11-05 (Phil Gyford’s website)

On the one hand I still really enjoy writing code and making something work and look good (ish) and put it online where anyone in the world can see it. It’s still like magic. And is still some kind of personal affirmation, a way of saying “here I am!”, of enjoying that it’s noticed by someone, somewhere.

True.

On the other hand, the maintenance. It’s not like this is new to me, keeping things going for years, decades. And I try to make things as easy as possible – keep things up to date, make things in similar ways, stick to reliable and boring technologies, don’t start too many things, etc. But, especially when several things aren’t quite working right, it’s such a weight.

Also true.

Personalization

A look at how personalisation works in digital interfaces and real-world objects.

P&B: Jim Nielsen – Manu

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.

P&B: Ana Rodrigues – Manu

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!

More Thoughtful Reading & Writing on the Web - Tantek

The combination of taking more time (as longer form writing encourages) and publishing on a domain associated with your name, your identity, enables & incentivizes more thoughtful writing. More thoughtful writing elevates the reader to a more thoughtful state of mind.

No more 404

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.

Brian Koberlein

What a beautiful website!

I don’t want your data – Manu

I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.

Same!

Nobody cares about your blog.

I just don’t care what you think, here’s my post and you can do nothing about it :)

Fifteen, or one-third | A Working Library

Mandy’s been blogging for fifteen years:

The new stuff sits next to the old but doesn’t supplant it, doesn’t shove it out of the way. Each new post lays atop the next like sediment, and all the old layers remain exposed for you to meander through, with their mediocre sentences and lapsed claims, all the sloppy thinking ever on display. It’s a great exercise in humility, keeping a blog for this many years. But in exchange for the keen awareness of how far I still have to go as a writer, I have the space to keep going. I have the home to keep coming back to. And I will. I will return, again and again.

Some blogging myths

• myth: you need to be original
• myth: you need to be an expert
• myth: posts need to be 100% correct
• myth: writing boring posts is bad
• myth: you need to explain every concept
• myth: page views matter
• myth: more material is always better
• myth: everyone should blog

What I Want From The Internet - Christopher Butler

You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. It’s not perfect. It leaves an enormous amount of signal unheard. It requires more work to find things, and to be found.

But you can do it. And I hope you do, in some way.