People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
sbf.org.uk/whats-on/view/the-beatrice-warde-memorial-lecture/
Oh, this looks like an excellent event (in London and online):
Adventures in Episodic Type Design
With David Jonathan Ross
Thursday 17th October 2024
Pulling out of a conference I was supposed to speak at because, now that the schedule is live, I see that 90% of the line-up is white dudes like me.
(They also don’t pay their speakers. These two things are not unrelated.)
And the show notes for the podcast from Sept 2, 2004, and now we are fully caught up.
Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything.
Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.
There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.
As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.
WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers.
Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.
Random thought. In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's growing, and generates lots of cash. Basically, charge writers for the service. I think they would have done well. And open source the Medium editor, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, and upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that).
Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.
So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.
You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?
Do it.
Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.
Here’s a picture from Belfast Trad Fest of me in my happy place (playing in a fantastic session led by piper Mick O’Brien and fiddler Sean Smyth).
newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art
If you have a pet parrot, it’s fun to get it to say “Help, I’m trapped in the body of a parrot!”
If you have a photocopier, it’s fun to copy a piece of paper that says “I am a sentient photocopier!”
#LargeLanguageModels
