Dan Q
Levelled up my blood donation game!
You can challenge my score here: https://www.blood.co.uk
This looks like a perfect use for the “donation” post type. I’m updating the wiki…
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Group picture @indiewebcamp London! #IndieWeb We had a good time “meeting” #Online during #COVID19
I’d hoped to attend IndieWebCamp London but after it got cancelled on account of Covid-19 we still managed to make it happen as a virtual meetup.
Remotely attending #indiewebcamp London 2020 (after Covid-19 kept us from meeting in person) and hacking on some note/checkin-posting tools.
EverythingWentBetterThanExpected.jpg 🤜🤛
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Have you heard about this new app called BoopSnoop?
It launched in the first week of 2020, and almost immediately, it was downloaded by four people in three different time zones. In the months since, it has remained steady at four daily active users, with zero churn: a resounding success, exceeding every one of its creator’s expectations.
:)
I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruthlessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it. I wanted to jot down some notes about how and why I made it, both to (a) offer a nudge to anyone else out there considering a similar project and (b) suggest something a little larger about software.
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Robin Sloan (yes, this one) talks about an app that he wrote exclusively for his family. He likens the experience to a making a home-cooked meal. And I totally get it.
I do this kind of thing all the time. Our new home NAS device, Fox, performs a handful of functions (and I plan to expand it to many more) based on a mixture of open-source and homegrown code, just for my immediate family. Our “family wiki” does the same thing. And the spreadsheet we use for our finances. I’ve written apps for small groups of friends before, too (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…). And that’s not to mention the countless “meals for one” I’ve cooked: small applications written entirely for my own benefit – I’m using one right now to pull this article from the list of “things I’ve read and enjoyed recently” into my blog.
A home-cooked meal benefits from being tailored to its audience (if the recipe calls for mustard, I might use less or omit it because it makes my nose feel funny). It benefits from being tailored to its purpose. And it benefits from the love that goes into it. My only superstition – that I’m aware of – is that I believe that food tastes better if the chef smiled during its production… I’m beginning to think that the same might be true for software, too.
First among the reasons I think that learning the basics of programming should be in the school curriculum is that it teaches people how computers work and so, by proxy, what they are (and are not) capable of. The most digitally-literate non-programmers I know are people who have the strongest understanding about how and why computers do what they do. But a close second among my reasons is that those with an inclination can go a step further and, without even necessarily pushing their skills to a level at which they could or would want to work as software developers, build their own tools to “scratch their own itches”. Solving a problem for yourself is enormously empowering, and the versatility of software lends itself to solving a huge array of relatively-tiny problems: problems that affect individuals, families, or small communities but that aren’t big enough to warrant commercial attention.
(Sometimes these projects explode into something bigger, but usually they remain just as they are: a tool for the benefit of oneself and one’s immediate tribe. And that’s just great.)
I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.
But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be
unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php:
// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post. function add_kind_to_rss_post_title(){ $kinds = wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' ); if( ! isset( $kinds ) || empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check. $kind = $kinds[0]->name; $title = get_the_title(); return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" ); } add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.
This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:
Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.
This is an RSVP post stating Dan's intention to attend (or not attend) an event. It's presented in a machine-readable format to notify event organisers via Webmention. See more RSVPs by Dan.
RSVP: I plan to attend IndieWebCamp London 2020.
When I arrived at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp I still wasn’t sure what it was that I would be working on. I’d worked recently to better understand the ecosystem surrounding DanQ.me and had a number of half-formed ideas about tightening it up. But instead, I ended up expanding the reach of my “personal web” considerably by adding reviews as a post type to my site and building tools to retroactively-reintegrate reviews I’d written on other silos.
Over the years, I’ve written reviews of products using Amazon and Steam and of places using Google Maps and TripAdvisor. These are silos and my content there is out of my control and could, for example, be deleted at a moment’s notice. This risk was particularly fresh in my mind as my friend Jen‘s Twitter account was suspended this weekend for allegedly violating the platform’s rules (though Twitter have so far proven unwilling to tell her which rules she’s broken or even when she did so, and she’s been left completely in the dark).
My mission for the weekend was to:
h-review is capable of expressing both and more.
I opted not to set up an ongoing POSSE nor PESOS process at this point; I’ll do this manually in the short term (I don’t write reviews on third-party sites often). Also out of scope were some other sites on which I’ve found that I’ve posted reviews, for example BoardGameGeek. These can both be tasks for a future date.
I used Google Takeout to export my Google Maps reviews, which comprised the largest number of reviews of the sites I targetted and which is the
least screen-scraper friendly. I wrote a bookmarklet-based screen-scraper to get the contents of my reviews on each of the other sites. Meanwhile, I edited by WordPress theme’s functions.php to extended the Post Kinds plugin with an
extra type of post, Review, and designed a content template which wrapped reviews in appropriate microformat markup, using metadata attached to each review post to show e.g. a
rating, embed a h-product (for products) or h-card (for
places). I also leveraged my existing work from last summer’s effort to reintegrate my geo*ing logs to automatically
add a map when I review a “place”. Finally, I threw together a quick WordPress plugin to import the data and create a stack of draft posts for proofing and publication.
So now you can read all of the reviews I’ve ever posted to any of those four sites, right here, alongside any other reviews I subsequently reintegrate and any I write directly to my blog in the future. The battle to own all of my own content after 25 years of scattering it throughout the Internet isn’t always easy, but it remains worthwhile.
(I haven’t open-sourced my work this time because it’s probably useful only to me and my very-specific set-up, but if anybody wants a copy they can get in touch.)
Arrived early for @indiewebcamp #oxford at @oxonlibraries. @garrettc still filling up on coffee.
With IndieWebCamp Oxford 2019 scheduled to take place during the Summer of Hacks, I drew a diagram (click to embiggen) of the current ecosystem that powers and propogates the content on DanQ.me. It’s mostly for my own benefit – to be able to get a big-picture view of the ways my website talks to the world and plan for what improvements I might be able to make in the future… but it also works as a vehicle to explain what my personal corner of the IndieWeb does and how it does it. Here’s a summary:
Since fifteen years ago today, DanQ.me has been powered by a self-hosted WordPress installation. I know that WordPress isn’t “hip” on the IndieWeb this week and that if you’re not on the JAMstack you’re yesterday’s news, but at 15 years and counting my love affair with WordPress has lasted longer than any romantic relationship I’ve ever had with another human being, so I’m sticking with it. What’s cool in Web technologies comes and goes, but what’s important is solid, dependable tools that do what you need them to, and between WordPress, half a dozen off-the-shelf plugins and about a dozen homemade ones I’ve got everything I need right here.
I write articles (long posts like this) and notes (short, “tweet-like” updates) directly into the site, and just occasionally other kinds of content. But for the most part, different kinds of content come from different parts of the ecosystem, as described below.
DanQ.me sits at the centre of the diagram, but it’s worth remembering that the diagram is deliberately incomplete: it only contains information flows directly relevant to my blog (and it doesn’t even contain all of those!). The last time I tried to draw a diagram like this that described my online life in general, then my RSS reader found its way to the centre. Which figures: my RSS reader is usually the first and often the last place I visit on the Internet, and I’ve worked hard to funnel everything through it.
Right now I’m using FreshRSS – plus a handful of plugins, including some homemade ones – as my RSS reader: I switched from Tiny Tiny RSS about a year ago to take advantage of FreshRSS’s excellent responsive themes, among other features. Because some websites don’t have RSS feeds, even where they ought to, I use my own tool RSSey to retroactively “fix” people’s websites for them, dynamically adding feeds for my consumption. It’s also a nice reminder that open source and remixability were cornerstones of the original Web. My RSS reader collates information from a variety of sources and additionally gives me a one-click mechanism to push content I enjoy to my blog as a repost.
QTube is my video hosting platform; it’s a PeerTube node. If you haven’t seen it, that’s fine: most content on it is consumed indirectly either through my YouTube channel or directly on my blog as posts of the “video” kind. Also, I don’t actually vlog very often. When I do publish videos onto QTube, their republication onto YouTube or DanQ.me is optional: sometimes I plan to use a video inside an article post, for example, and so don’t need to republish it by itself.
I’m gradually exporting or re-uploading my backlog of YouTube videos from my current and previous channels to QTube in an effort to recentralise and regain control over their hosting, but I’m in no real hurry. PeerTube certainly makes it easy, though!
I operate a private link shortener which I mostly use for the expected purpose: to make links shorter and so easier to read out and memorise or else to make them take up less space in a chat window. But soon after I set it up, many years ago, I realised that it could also act as a mechanism to push content to my RSS reader to “read later”. And by the time I’m using it for that, I figured, I might as well also be using it to repost content to my blog from sources that aren’t things my RSS reader subscribes to. This leads to a process that’s perhaps unnecessarily complex: if I want to share a link with you as a repost, I’ll push it into my link shortener and mark it as going “to me”, then I’ll tell my RSS reader to push it to my blog and there it’ll be published to the world! But it works and it’s fast enough: I’m not in the habit of reposting things that are time-critical anyway.
I’ve been involved in brainstorming ways in which the act of finding (or failing to find, etc.) a geocache or reaching (or failing to reach) a geohashpoint could best be represented as a “checkin“, and last year I open-sourced my plugin for pulling logs (with as much automation as is permitted by the terms of service of some of the silos involved) from geocaching websites and posting them to WordPress blogs: effectively PESOS-for-geocaching. I’d prefer to be publishing on my own blog in the first instance, but syndicating my adventures from various silos into my blog is “good enough”.
New notes get pushed out to my Twitter account, for the benefit of my Twitter-using friends. Articles get advertised on Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal (yes, really) in teaser form, for the benefit of friends who prefer to get notifications via those platforms. Facebook have been fucking around with their APIs and terms of service lately and this is now less-automatic than it used to be, which is a bit of an annoyance. My RSS feeds carry copies of content out to people who prefer to subscribe via that medium, and I’ve also been using this to power an experimental MailChimp “daily digest” mailing list of “what Dan’s been up to” to a small number of friends, right in their email inboxes: I’ve not made it available to everybody yet, but if you’re happy to help test it then give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.
Finally, a couple of IFTTT recipes push my articles and my reposts to Reddit communities: I don’t really use Reddit myself, any more, but I’ve got friends in a few places there who prefer to keep up-to-date with what I’m up to via that medium. For historical reasons, my reposts to Reddit don’t go directly via my blog’s RSS feeds but “shortcut” directly from my RSS reader: this is suboptimal because I don’t get to tweak post titles for Reddit but it’s not a big deal.
I used to syndicate content to Google+ (before it joined the long list of Things Google Have Killed) and to Ello (but it never got much traction there). I’ve probably historically syndicated to other places too: I’ve certainly manually-republished content to other blogs, from time to time, too.
I use Ryan Barrett‘s excellent Brid.gy to convert Twitter replies and likes back into Webmentions for publication as comments on my blog. This used to work for Facebook, too, but again: Facebook fucked it over. I’ve occasionally manually backfed significant Facebook comments, but it’s not ideal: I might like to look at using similar technologies to RSSey to subvert Facebook’s limitations.
I’ve routinely retroactively reintegrated content that I’ve produced elsewhere on the Web. This includes my previous blogs (which is why you can browse my archives, right here on this site, all the way back to some of the cringeworthy angsty-teenager posts I made in the 1990s) but also some Reddit posts, some replies originally posted directly to other people’s blogs, all my old del.icio.us bookmarks, long-form forum posts, posts I made to mailing lists and newsgroups, and more. As a result, there’s a lot of backdated content on this site, nowadays: almost a million words, and significantly more than the 600,000 or so I counted a few years ago, before my biggest push for reintegration!
Why do I do this? Because I really, really like owning my identity online! I’ve tried the “big” silo alternatives like Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram etc., and they’ve eventually always lead to disappointment, either because they get shut down or otherwise made-unusable, because of inappropriately-applied “real names” policies, because they give too much power to untrustworthy companies, because they impose arbitrary limitations on my content, because they manipulate output promotion (and exacerbate filter bubbles), or because they make the walls of their walled gardens taller and stop you integrating with them how you used to.
A handful of silos have shown themselves to be more-trustworthy than the average – in particular, eschewing techniques that promote “lock-in” – and I’d love to tell you more about them and what I think you should look for in a silo, another time. But for now: suffice to say that just like I don’t use YouTube like most people do, I elect not to use Facebook or Twitter in the conventional ways either. And it’s awesome, thanks.
There are plenty of reasons that people choose to take control of their own Web presence – and everybody who puts content online ought to consider it – but I imagine that few individuals have such a complicated publishing ecosystem as I do! Now you’ve got a picture of how my digital content production workflow works, and perhaps start owning your online identity, too.
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Fusion Tables… Fabric… Inbox… Google+… goo.gl… Goggles… Site Search… Glass… Now… Code… Bump!… Gears… Desktop Search…
Just some of the projects and services that Google has offered and then killed; this site aims to catalogue them all. Some, like Wave, were given to the community (Wave lived on for a while as an Apache project but is now basically dead), but most, like Reader, were assassinated in a misguided attempt to drive traffic to other services (ultimately, Reader was killed perhaps to try to get people onto Google+, which was then also killed).
Google can’t be trusted to maintain the services of theirs that you depend upon (relevant XKCD?). That’s not a phenomenon that’s unique to Google, of course: it’s perhaps just that they produce so many new and often-experimental services that they inevitably cease supporting more of them than some of the many other providers who’ve killed the silos that people depended upon.
How could things be better? For a start, Google could make a better commitment to open-source and developing standards rather than platforms. But if you don’t think you can trust them to do that – and you can’t – then the only solution for individuals is to use fewer Google products to break the Google-monoculture. Encourage the competition to weaken their position, and break free from silos in general where it’s possible to do so.
148+ projects and services dead. But hey, we’re getting Stadia so everything’s okay, right? <sigh>
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In the days before the web was mainstream, it was a place of creation. First for education, then for every random idea that any creator had!
As the web transitioned from a network of educational institutions to the consumer force it is today, the early adopters were technologists… AKA geeks!
A hallmark of geek culture is fandom – a deep knowledge of whatever topic interests them. This could be about a book, TV show, movie or band. With this passion comes a desire to share it with the world. Before the internet, there was no clear path. After the web started gaining traction, it was the biggest and easiest megaphone you could want.
It wasn’t always easy to be found, though. There was no search algorithm. Google was not ubiquitous with search. To be found, you needed to be listed on a site that aggregated other sites about your topic.
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There was always a certain joy to a well-kept webring, back in the day. I’d love to see a return to this kind of “Indieweb dream”, but I don’t think that just wishing for it nor even telling people to go out and do it goes far enough, alone. Hopefully Bryan’s post will help nudge a few people in the right direction, though.
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MySpace inspired a generation of teenagers to learn how to code. We have Dark Mode now, but where did all the glitter go?
During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
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I agree entirely with Jarred: in discouraging people from having their own web presences and in locking-down our shared social spaces online, we’re making the Web feel increasingly flat, soulless, and – dare I say is – joyless. MDX seems really cool, but I’m not yet convinced that it alone solves the underlying problem of content creators feeling that they should (or must) use dry, boring silos for the things they produce rather than their own space (in which they’d be able to express their personalities and the personality of the things they were sharing). It may well lower the barrier to producing interactive personal sites a little (as well as having other applications, I’m sure!), but we’re going to need more than that to drag people away from Facebook, Medium, Twitter and the like.
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Earlier this month I had the good fortune to attend Material, a conference that explores the concept of the web as a material and all the intrinsic characteristics that entails. The variety of talks provided new perspectives on what it means to build for – and with – the web, and prompted me to …
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What it means for something to be of the web has been discussed many times before. While the technical test can be reasonably objective – is it addressable, accessible and available – culturally it remains harder to judge. But I don’t know about you, I’ve found that certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others.
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Despite being nonspecific on the nature of the feeling he describes, Paul hits the nail on the head. Your favourite (non-Medium) blog or guru site almost certainly has that feel of being “of the web”. Your favourite API-less single-page app (with the growing “please use in Chrome” banner) almost certainly does not.
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