People also need a motive to start a personal website

Showing all posts tagged: IndieWeb

People also need a motive to start a personal website

15 November 2024

How do we make it easier for “everyone else,” the “normies,” all those “regular” folk who just want to get online, how do we reduce the friction required to get them to make their own little corners of the web? How do we make the #IndieWeb easier? How do we make the #WebRevival more convenient?

It’s the question of the times, and one I think about. Thing is, almost “everyone else” is comfortable with the ease of using a social media platform to get online. Set up an account. Find friends and follow them. Ask them to do the same. Start posting stuff. Sit back and enjoy the discussion that might accompany a post. No special knowledge required. Nothing else to worry about.

It’s just too easy. But the personal website space really seems reserved for people with a keen interest in creating their own presence online, because there are a few hurdles to entry. I could say — with my relatively low-tech website setup — “well, look at me. I don’t have that much technical knowledge, but see: I have a website, therefore so can you.” But that’s not really much help.

I wanted to have a personal website, and was motivated enough to figure what I needed to do, to make that happen. The problem is, I just don’t think there’s too many regular people, who are the same. Even if there are free-to-sign-up options, such as WordPress.com, or Neocities, open to them.

So, it’s not just ease of setup. Some sort of motive is needed. And motives have come along before. Fifteen to twenty years ago people left, right, and centre, were setting up blogs, motivated by the prospect of making money from them. Some bloggers boasted of “six-figure incomes.” It was enough to see complete novices figuring out content management systems, hosting, content production, and how to build an audience, all in the name of bringing in a dollar or million.

I don’t know what the prospects are like for website monetisation today. Sure, there’s people making some money from their blogs, but like fifteen-plus years ago, only a handful are earning enough to make a difference. Making money from a website may not then be the enticement we’re looking for.

If we are to lure more people away from social media, and encourage them to launch personal websites, presenting them with a motive is something that also needs to be considered.

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blogs, IndieWeb, technology, trends

Building a website is easy: a guide to the first steps

16 October 2024

HTML for people, by American software developer Blake Watson, is a helpful resource for people wishing to build their first website, with a simple text editor. HTML for people guides first time web designers through the process of creating webpages, to uploading them, to produce a live website.

You, my friend, are about to go from zero to internet by putting your very first homemade page on the web. I will let you in on a little secret — websites are just files with text. They don’t require fancy, expensive software to create. You can literally make a website with Notepad. In fact, that’s what we’ll do right now.

It’s literally that simple, and it’s what I did — using Notepad, a simple text editor — way back in the day, to create the first version of disassociated. I was still using NotePad until recently, to create the PHP files here. If you’re on Linux, Mousepad is a simple text editor you could try there.

But even today, you can still comfortably go old-school, and build a website using component HTML files, e.g. an index page, about page, blog page, etc, using a simple text editor, without the need for CMS software, such as WordPress, if you so wanted.

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IndieWeb, technology, web design

All IndieWeb participants need to be vocal, not just developers

5 October 2024

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.

Independent bookshops, independent web, a tale of two cities

4 October 2024

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.

Independent websites: vital for the survival of the hyperlink

3 October 2024

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.

Indie Web, small web, social web, whatever web, my web

4 September 2024

There’s been a bit of a surge in discussion recently about Indie Web, and seemingly what it means to be a true adherent. This time the focus appears to be about what I’m going to call technical proficiency. From what I can gather, having your own website, with your own domain name, and your own content, isn’t quite making the Indie Web grade, in certain quarters.

Some people, who have the website, the domain, and the content, say they feel excluded because they’re apparently not doing more. Not doing more technical stuff. And I’d be in that category. It’s strange talk really. After all, Indie Web is many things to many people. There’s no Indie Web head office, dictating what we must, or must not do. But here, thankfully, is the sort of clarity we need:

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.

Just make it yours. This was the web I always knew. I just came here to self-publish. To speak to whoever would listen to me. I started out with static HTML pages, on Notepad. Then I started adding CSS. I eventually arrived, ten years later, where I still am today, with WordPress.

Of course there were cashed up, corporate, players around in the late 1990’s trying to turn a profit on the web. But we, the personal, non-commercial, website people, who later became known as bloggers, co-existed quite harmoniously with this big-end of the web. We did our thing; they did theirs. And both parties, from what I saw, seemed to prosper in their own ways.

But that was back in the good old days.

Indie Web to me — and the definition seems to be subjective to some (quite some) degree — is a foil to what the web has become today, twenty to twenty-five years later. This despite the founding of the IndieWeb group in 2011. Indie Web, at its essence is our own place away from the corporate web, the social media behemoths, and the algorithms preventing us from finding the content we really seek.

I’ll admit to be being somewhat befuddled by the likes of webmentions, micro-formats, and ActivityPub protocol (which actually baffles me fully at present). Clearly these technologies serve a purpose, but in reality they don’t help me much with my primary objective here, which is to write.

If I’m not Indie Web enough then for someone, they can go somewhere else. But, with an attitude like that, I don’t know how much more “Indie Web” I could be. Well maybe. Thing is, I’ve never quite considered myself to be naturally Indie Web. Not one-hundred percent, as much as I like the general concept. Instead, I’ve often seen myself has being independent.

I’ve written as much on my about page:

The word disassociated has a number of meanings, but in this context it means to do my own thing, to go my own way, to have my own gig, to be independent.

So perhaps, independent web is a more suitable moniker in my case.

Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want.

Perhaps though we could leave FrontPage out of this. I too had an ill-fated, though infinitesimally brief, run-in with the Microsoft (MS) product, many moons ago. FrontPage was a WYSIWYG website design editor with all good intentions, but terrible execution. What on earth, for example, were those server extensions that MS kept banging on about?

By 1998, the web was picking up momentum. People just wanted to get a website, usually a personal/family affair, online. And they wanted to do so pronto. They didn’t have the time or patience to learn about HTML, CSS, and FTP, let alone propriety server extensions. Too many, FrontPage must have seemed like the answer to their prayers. Until they opened the box*.

But look, if FrontPage is how you Indie Web, or just web, then don’t let me stop you. But please don’t come asking me for any help with those server extensions.

* this in the days when software apps literally arrived in a box.

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blogs, IndieWeb, technology, trends

One Minute Park, One Million Checkboxes, win Tiny Awards 2024

29 August 2024

One Minute Park by Elliott Cost, has been named winner of the main prize of the Tiny Awards 2024, while One Million Checkboxes by Nolen Royalty, took out the multiplayer player gong.

One is your lucky number this year. Held annually since last year, 2023, the Tiny Awards recognise excellence in non-commercial websites designed by individuals and/or or groups of creators.

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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology

Threat of AI, demise of blogging, the world in February 2015

15 August 2024

Since re-booting disassociated in May 2022, I’ve been slowly (incredibly slowly) restoring selected posts from the previous version of the blog that was online between 2007 and 2017. The restored posts are tagged legacy, and also include a few posts written prior to 2007, going back to 2003.

On checking as I typed this, I see there are presently seventy-four of the old posts back here now. Considering there were about twelve thousand posts originally, bringing back selected older posts is taking quite some time. I don’t intend to restore every last old post though. Some of them are now quite irrelevant and out-dated, and many include an abundance of dead links and long gone URLs.

If twelve-grand seems a lot, many posts were link-blog style, one-sentence affairs. My priority, when time permits, is bring back more of the article-type posts, such as film reviews. Anyway, to get to my point, a couple of posts I restored from February 2015, a mere nine-and-a-half-years ago now, still seem surprisingly relevant today.

One was about an apparently AI powered then Twitter account, called INTERESTING_JPG, which, although now inactive, remains online. INTERESTING would “look” at popular photos, and describe what it saw. INTERESTING’s accuracy was so-so, to the say the least. While AI is certainly a trending topic today, the concept has of course been present for a long time.

The other post I restored, which was originally published on 16 February 2015, was about the apparent demise of blogging, and personal websites. This not quite four years after the #IndieWeb movement, which is very much based on blogs and personal websites, was founded in 2011.

So there we have it. AI and #IndieWeb, two ideas that been with us for quite some time, but are, in a sense, making waves today.

The website song: everyone is free to write websites, an IndieWeb anthem

13 August 2024

Everybody’s Free (To Write Websites), by Robb Knight, and Keenan. Spectacularly riffing off Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s 1999 video, the Sunscreen Song, this is for the graduating Indie Web class of whenever. There is an abundance of sage advice here.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now.

There’s so much goodness here, I don’t know where to begin choosing my favourite lines. Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP. Code one thing every day that amuses you. Remember the guestbook entries you receive; forget the spam. And: Some of the most interesting web sites I enjoy just are.

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Baz Luhrmann, humour, IndieWeb

Tiny Awards 2024 shortlist announced, public voting open

24 July 2024

The shortlists for the 2024 Tiny Awards have been published. Now in their second year, the Tiny Awards honour “interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.” Think the work of small, and independent creatives.

To be eligible, websites need to be non-commercial, and launched during, or after, June 2023.

Rotating Sandwiches — a website featuring images of rotating sandwiches, go and see for yourself — won the inaugural award in 2023. The 2024 winners — there are two categories, main award, and multiplayer — will be announced on Sunday 18 August 2024.

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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology

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