disassociated

I’ve been trying out Hardcover, a social catalogue for book readers, founded by Adam Fortuna in April 2021. Like a few people I think, he was looking for an alternative to Goodreads (GR), which at the time was probably the big name in book social cataloguing. StoryGraph is one option, but Fortuna wanted to make something himself:

Hardcover was started in May 2021 after Goodreads announced they were discontinuing their API. At the time, I (hi 👋, I’m Adam!) was using that API to show what books I’d recently read on my blog. It would automatically update just by using GR. It worked great!

But when they announced the API was going away, that lit a fire under me to find (or make) a replacement. After some research and forming a team, we’ve been working to create an Amazon-free alternative ever since!

I’ve been a Goodreads member since June 2018, and while it’s a useful resource, I find it a bit clunky to use sometimes. If you’re a book reader, like I try to be sometimes, you can track me down at Hardcover if you wish, username the same as this website.

Samantha Cole, writing at 404 Media:

The checkbox on the login page for WordPress.org asks users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” Users who don’t check that box can’t log in or register a new account. As of Tuesday, that checkbox didn’t exist.

Automattic upping the ante in the on-going stouch with website hosting company WP Engine. I didn’t see this message when I logged into my WordPress (WP) account, Thursday afternoon AEDT. Maybe the roll-out is gradual, or (more fancifully) WP knows I host disassociated elsewhere.

Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps?

Before switching to Word, I used to draft all my blog posts in WordPad. Now I use Writer. I did, still do, prep all the text and HTML tags when writing up a blog post, then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. When I migrated to WordPress in 2007, I used WordPad (heh, WP) to set out all the old blog posts from the old static, manually coded HTML webpages, onto an upload template. I later imported the template in the then new database on the WordPress install. So, WP to WP. The whole process took months, and I still look through the file today, which I’ve kept in an archive folder.

I expect the end game, on Microsoft’s part, is to push everyone onto Word. For a subscription.

Frequent use of the Oxford Comma, also referred to as the Serial Comma, is — apparently — a tell-tale sign a written work was composed using an AI chatbot. The repeat use of the punctuation mark is among seven indicators researchers at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, identified after studying AI generated articles and essays.

As a life-long adherent of the Oxford Comma — read enough of the content here, and you’ll notice them — this alarms me. AI doesn’t write a word here, every Oxford Comma instance you see in my copy, was placed by me. On the up side, at least ChatGPT has the good taste to use the Oxford Comma in the first place.

New York City based web designer, standards advocate, founder of A List Apart, and many other things, Jeffrey Zeldman:

I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.

I didn’t know Zeldman worked at Automattic, but I used to read his website/blog every day when I worked as a web designer.

Without getting involved in the WordPress/WP Engine imbroglio, the Automattic severance package seemed quite generous, given it catered for employees who disagreed with the company’s stance. It seems to me dissenting employees anywhere else would simply be shown the door.

No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert:

Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most enjoyable day” he says, without even thinking about leaving the house. Trackies optional. No need to talk to another human soul. Maybe the dog. Maybe not a word. But probably picking up any one of several footballs that are left lying around the place, because Cleary “just feels normal being able to hold a footy”.

I too have the most enjoyable days, without even thinking about leaving the house. Even if I actually seldom stay at home the whole day. Instead of a football though, I’ll reach for my laptop.

And it turns out Cleary’s girlfriend, Matildas’ star Mary Fowler, is also an introvert. That, as we say in this household, is a match made in heaven.

Evan Sheehan, writing at The Darth Mall:

I think Jeremy Keith is right, that all that really matters is having your own website. However big or small, however you make it, whatever you choose to put on it. I just don’t think that this is what the IndieWeb is actually focused on. The IndieWeb feels like it’s something by developers, for developers, because it focuses so much on implementing certain features.

My take here, is that it’s the people developing and implementing the microformats, the webmentions, what have you (sorry, a lot of this stuff is over my head), who seem to be the most vocal in the conversation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but you’d be forgiven for sometimes thinking IndieWeb was the exclusive domain of developers. But I’m not having a go at developers here, because, you know, if there were no developers, there’d be no web/internet.

Instead, the discussion needs more input from others in the IndieWeb community. The creatives, the writers, the artists, the photographers. The other people doing their thing on the non-corporate web. There are already such people doing that, but more need to weigh in. The topic brings to mind something American author Edgar Allen-Poe once wrote:

Shadows of Shadows passing… It is now 1831… and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

It’s all very deep. But the point is that different ideas complement each other. IndieWeb, the web, needs the technical infrastructure, but then alongside that, there needs to be something else. An idea, a thought, content. Something to engage with.

It’s my roundabout way of saying IndieWeb isn’t just for the technical people, it’s for anyone who wants to be involved. And in this case, the more the merrier. Let’s hear it then, from the other IndieWeb participants.

Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker. How familiar does this sound:

Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business.

It was a similar story for personal websites and blogs, though definitely across different timeframes. Maybe from 2010 — later even — as social media began to dominate the web. Something else was dominating the book market though:

Even though books make up a relatively small fraction of Amazon’s sales, they constitute more than half of all book purchases in the United States. Amazon is responsible for more than half of all e-book sales, and it dominates self-publishing with its Kindle Direct platform.

After a time though, consumers began to yearn for the bookstore vibe again. A certain something was missing when buying literature online. Book buyers wanted a more personal experience, one that only brick and mortar bookshops could offer:

One is the obvious benefit of being able to fondle the product. Printed books have, inescapably, a tactile dimension. They want to be held. “Browsing” online is just not the same experience. For that, you need non-virtual books in a non-virtual space.

Then the movement started. Not IndieWeb though, rather IndieBookstores. The push was spearheaded by American author James Patterson:

When the pandemic started, Patterson launched a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, to help such businesses survive. He pledged half a million dollars, and, with the support of the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, the campaign ended up raising $1,239,595 from more than eighteen hundred donors.

Maybe that’s where I’ll leave this independent bookshops to independent web analogy/allegory, and suggest you read (or listen to the audio of) Menand’s article in full. Save for this sobering sentence:

According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand.

It ain’t easy being a writer; making a living from writing. If independent bookshops can help authors realise a even few more sales of their work, then that can only be a good thing.

This Halifax Examiner article, by Philip Moscovitch, which features a number of quotes by Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles Times journalist, recorded on a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has been doing the rounds. The upshot being hyperlinks, links from one webpage to another, are in danger of becoming obsolete. Extinct. Quite unsurprisingly, social media, and some search engines, are among the culprits intent on “degrading” hyperlinks:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…

Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging platform, allows hyperlinks to be included in posts at the moment. Whether though they “degrade” them, in X/Twitter style, down the line, remains to be seen. Instagram has never been hyperlink friendly, but remember it started out as a platform for sharing photos, not links.

Not long after I started making websites in the late 1990’s, I read an article about Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web in 1991. The piece is long gone now, but as I recall it, Berners-Lee said when he devised HTML, the markup language used to build websites, he made it intentionally simple to use (though maybe hard to master…). This so information could be shared easily:

However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer working at the CERN research center on the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Here we are, all these years later, where some people would like to do away with one of the web’s building blocks, which made everything we have today possible in the first place. Go figure. Well, link-haters are gonna hate, and do their best rid their web of hyperlinks, I guess. What this does though is underline the importance of an independent web, and websites that are interlinked by hyperlinks. Continue freely and abundantly sharing those links everyone.

Juice is the latest novel by Australian author Tim Winton, which was published yesterday. From this synopsis, Juice sounds like it blends elements of the Max Mad saga, with Winton’s own environmental and climate change concerns:

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.

Problem is, they’re not alone.

So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.

I heard Winton speak about six-and-a-half years ago at the Sydney premiere of Breath, a film based on his 2009, Miles Franklin award winning, novel of the same name. The feature was directed by, and starred, Australian actor Simon Baker, also present that evening.

Winton was one of the screenwriters of the Breath film adaptation. That’s a smart move, get the author of the book being adapted, to co-write the screenplay. Where possible of course. Quite a number of Winton’s books have been made into movies, so it seems like there’s a good chance Juice will follow suit.